i % 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

ChapkP.j Copyright No.. 
Sheia. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



BITS OF ORE FROM RICH MINES 



lEbucational fluooets 




PLATO ARISTOTLE ROUSSEAU HERBART 
SPENCER HARRIS BUTLER ELIOT 



Gathered by John R. Howard 

NEW YORK: 
FORDS, HOWARD, & HULBERT 




Copyright in 1899 by Fords, Howard, & Hulbert. 




SECOND COPY, 



NOTE. 

The aim of this little group of discon- 
nected yet closely related paragraphs on 
Education is suggestiveness, inspiration, and 
encouragement, — and that especially for the 
training of right-minded men and women 
as citizens of our American republic. 

Systems of Education have been many 
and various, each suited to its time ; yet 
from Plato's day to our own the tinest minds 
have seen in it all a lofty unity, which in the 
present age is developing into a scientific 
method, based on the study of nature, man, 
and society. " Consistency and universality 
are the tests of truth," says Professor Jow- 
ett ; and in the best ideals of Education 
these tests hold, from ancient Greece to 
modern America. 

Happily the spirit of our time, in the 
earnest consideration of Education as a 
science, is diffusing this larger conception 
more and more widely. Yet many teachers 



iv Note. 

rebel against the social order of his time — 
wrought damage with his political writings, 
but was a prophet of blessing to all children. 
The tender, patient study of childhood, 
taught in his hnile, inspired the new epoch 
in Education which has signalized the pres- 
ent century. It was the direct stimulus of 
Pestalozzi, who brought the ideas of spon- 
taneity and self-activity into practical educa- 
tional work, and of his disciple Froebel, the 
originator of the Kindergarten with all its 
suggestive principles. Avoiding a tempta- 
tion to interesting details, the compilation 
omits these two reformers. The one follow- 
ing Rousseau is Herbart, whose psychology 
informs all the educational science of our 
day. Spencer — the great co-ordinator of all 
sciences under the general principles of the 
evolutionary doctrine — that marvel of spec- 
ial knowledges and of almost universal wis- 
dom in arraying them — is represented by 
pregnant paragraphs from his treatise on 
Education. 

After Spencer come three men in active 
American life to-day. These are : Harris — 
whose writings are standard, and whose 



Note. V 

labors as United States Commissioner of 
Education have done much towards unifying 
our American school systems ; Butler — 
whose original impetus to the Teachers' 
College, and whose helpful interest in our 
common schools, despite his special work in 
the chair of Philosophy at Columbia, are 
felt throughout the land ; and Eliot — the 
masterly head of Harvard, the chief apostle 
of the elective courses, whose educational 
ideas embrace a harmonious progress from 
Kindergarten to University. 

From these thoughtful students of the 
science and practical experts in the art of 
Education, parents, teachers, and those who 
are likely to become such, can draw many 
suggestions of value. The few extracts 
gathered from their writings will, it is hoped, 
inspire the wish to know more of them. In 
every case the title, author, and publisher of 
volumes quoted from have been named, not 
only in recognition of courteous permissions 
to make extracts but in the hope that these 
briefs from living books will interest readers 
to draw more fully from the original sources, 
and to read the books themselves. 



CONTENTS. 



Plato— B. C. 429-347 
Aristotle— B. C. 384-322 
Jean Jacques Rousseau — A. D 
1712-1788 

JOHANN FRIEDERICH HeRBART— 

I776-I84I 
Herbert Spencer — 1820 
William Torrey Harris — 1835 
Nicholas Murray Butler— 1862 
Charles William Eliot— 1834 



13 

17 

25 

59 

105 

141 

179 



PLATO. 

*' Out of Plato come all things that are still written 
and debated among men of thought. Great havoc 
makes he among our originalities. We have reached 
the mountain from w^hich all these drift bowlders were 
detached." — Emerson. 

From "The Republic." ^ 

A State arises out of the needs of man- 
kind ; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us 
have many wants. . . . Then as we have 
many wants, and many persons are needed 
to supply them, one takes a helper for one 
purpose and another for another : and when 
these partners and helpers are gathered 
together in one habitation, the body of in- 
habitants is termed a State. 

He who is to be a really good and noble 
guardian of the State will require to unite in 
himself philosophy and spirit and swiftness 
and strength. 



1 The Dialogues of Plato. Translation of B. 
JowETT. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1875. 



Educational Nuggets. 



Then we have found the desired natures : 
and now that we have found them how are 
they to be reared and educated ? ^ 

Can we find a better than the traditional 
sort ? — and this has two divisions, gymnas- 
tic for the body and music for the soul. 

And when you speak of music, do you 
include literature or not ? — I do. 

And literature may be either true or false. 
And the young should be trained in both 
kinds, and we begin with the false. . . . 
We begin by telling children stories, which, 
though not wholly destitute of truth, are in 
the main fictitious. 

You know also that the beginning is the 
most important part of any work, especially 
in the case of a young and tender thing : 



^ " No pains are spared in Europe to educate princes 
and nobles who are to govern. No expense is counted 
too great to prepare the governing classes for their 
function. America has her governing class too ; and 
that governing class is the whole people." — H. W. 
Beecher. 



\ 



PlatG. 



for that is the time at which the character is 
being formed and the desired impression is 
more readily taken. 

A young person cannot judge what is 
allegorical and what is literal ; anything that 
he receives into his mind at that age is likely 
to become indelible and unalterable ; and 
therefore it is most important that the tales 
which the young first hear should be models 
of virtuous thought. 

Beauty of style and harmony and grace 
and good rhythm depend on simplicity, — I 
mean the simplicity of a rightly and nobly 
ordered character. . . . And ugliness and 
discord and inharmonious motion are nearly 
allied to ill words and ill nature, as grace 
and harmony are the twin sisters of good- 
ness and virtue, and bear their image. 

We would not have our guardians grow 
up amid images of moral deformity, as in 
some noxious pasture, and then browse and 
feed upon many a baneful herb and flower 
day by day, little by little, until they silently 



Educational Nuggets, 



gather a festering mass of corruption in their 
own soul. Let our artists rather be those who 
are gifted to discern the true nature of the 
beautiful and graceful ; then will our youth 
dwell in a land of health, amid fair sights 
and sounds, and receive the good in every- 
thing; and beauty, the effluence of fair 
works, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a 
health-giving breeze from a purer region, 
and insensibly draw the soul from earliest 
years into likeness and sympathy with the 
beauty of reason. 

And, therefore, musical [including literary] 
training is a more potent instrument than 
any other, because rhj^thm and harmony 
find their way into the inward places of the 
soul, on which they mightily fasten, impart- 
ing grace, and making the soul of him who 
is rightly educated graceful or of him who is 
ill-educated ungraceful ; and also because he 
who has received this true education of the 
inner being will most shrewdly perceive 
omissions or faults in art and nature, and 
with a true taste, while he praises and re- 
joices over and receives into his soul the 



Plato. 5 

good, and becomes noble and good, he will 
justly blame and hate the bad, now, in the 
days of his youth, even before he is able to 
know the reason w^hy; and when reason 
comes he will recognize and salute the friend 
with whom his education has made him long 
familiar. 

And when a beautiful soul harmonizes 
with a beautiful form, and the two are cast 
in one mould, that will be the fairest of 
sights to him who has an eye to see it. 

Gymnastic as well as music should begin 
in early years ; the training in it should be 
careful and should continue through life. 
Now my belief is not that the good body by 
any bodily excellence improves the soul, but, 
on the contrary, that the good soul, by her 
own excellence, improves the body as far as 
this may be possible. 

The very exercises and toils which he un- 
dergoes are intended to stimulate the spirited 
element of his nature, and not to increase his 
strength ; he will not, like common athletes, 



Educatio7ial Nuggets. 



use exercise and regimen to develop his 
muscles. Neither are the two arts of music 
and gymnastic really designed, as is often 
supposed, the one for the training of the 
soul, the other for the training of the body. 
The teachers of both have in view chiefly 
the improvement of the soul. 

Did you never observe the effect on the 
mind itself of exclusive devotion to gymnastic, 
or the opposite effect of an exclusive devo- 
tion to music ? The one produces a temper 
of hardness and ferocity, the other of softness 
and effeminacy. . . . And as there are two 
principles of human nature, one the spirited 
[that of forceful energy] and the other the 
philosophical [that of thought and reason], 
some God, as I should say, has given man- 
kind two arts answering to them (and only 
indirectly to the soul and body) in order 
that these two principles (like the strings of 
an instrument) may be relaxed or drawn 
tighter until they are harmonized. 

And he who mingles music with gymnas- 
tic in the fairest proportions, and best 



Plato. 7 

attempers them to the soul, may be rightly 
called the true musician or harmonist in a 
far higher sense than the tuner of the strings. 
And such a presiding genius will always be 
required in our State, if the government is to 
last. 

The State if once started well moves with 
accumulating force like a wheel. For good 
nurture and education emplant good consti- 
tutions, and these good constitutions taking 
root in a good education improve more and 
more, and their improvement affects the 
breed in men as in other animals. | 

When they have by the help of music 
gained the spirit of good order, then this 
habit of order will accompany them in all 
their actions and be a principle of growth to 
them, and if there are any fallen places in 
the State will raise them up again. 

Of course they will go on expeditions to- 
gether ; and will take with them any children 
who are strong enough, that, after the manner 
of the artisan's child, they may look on at the 



8 Educational Nuggets. 

the business of later life, and should be for 
the most part imitations of the occupations 
which they will hereafter pursue in earnest. 

Youth should be kept strangers to all that 
is bad, and especially to things which suggest 
vice or hate. 

There are two periods of life into which 
education has to be divided, from seven to 
the age of puberty, and onwards to the age 
of one-and-twenty. 

The neglect of education does harm to 
states. 

The citizen should be moulded to suit the 
government under which he lives. 

That education should be regulated by law 
and should be an affair of state is not to be 
denied. 

There can be no doubt that children should 
be taught those useful things which are really 
necessary, but not all things ; for occupations 
are divided into liberal and illiberal, and to 
young children should be imparted only such 



Plato. 9 

This is knowledge of the kind for which we 
are seeking, having a double use, military and 
philosophical ; for the man of war must learn 
the art of numbers or he will not know how 
to array his troops, and the philosopher also, 
because he has to arise out of the sea of 
change and lay hold of true being, and 
therefore he must be an arithmetician. . . . 
We must endeavor to persuade those who 
are to be the principal men of our State to 
go and learn Arztkfnetzc, not as ama- 
teurs, but they must carry on the study 
until they see the nature of numbers with 
the mind only. . . . Arithmetic has a very 
great and elevating effect, com.pelling the 
mind to reason about abstract number. 

And have you further observed that those 
who have a natural talent for calculation are 
generally quick at every other kind of know- 
ledge ; and even the dull, if they have had an 
arithmetical training, although they may de- 
rive no other advantage from it, always be- 
come much quicker than they otherwise 
would have been. . . . And for all these 



I o Educa t zonal Nuggets. 

reasons arithmetic is a kind of knowledge in 
whicli the best natures should be trained. 

For that part of the kindred science 
\Geometry\ which related to war a very little 
of either geometry or calculation will be 
enough ; the question relates rather to the 
greater and more advanced part of geometry 
— whether that tends in any degree to make 
more easy the vision of the idea of good. . . . 
The knowledge at which geometry aims is 
knowledge of the eternal, and not of aught 
perishing or transient. . . . Geometry will 
draw the soul towards the truth and create 
the spirit of philosophy. 

And suppose we make Astronomy the 
third — what do you say ? 

I am strongly inclined to it, he said ; the 
observation of the seasons and of weather 
and years is as essential to the general as it 
is to the farmer and sailor. 

I am amused, I said, at your fear of the 
world which makes you guard against the 
appearance of insisting upon useless studies ; 
I quite admit the difficulty of believing that 



Plato. 1 1 

in every man there is an eye of the soul 
which, when by other pursuits lost and 
dimmed, is by these purified and re-illu- 
mined ; and is more precious far than ten 
thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth 
seen. . . . And will not a true astronomer 
have the same feeling when he looks at the 
movements of the stars ? Will he not think 
that heaven and the things in heaven are 
framed by the Creator of them in the most 
perfect manner ? 

The teachers of Harmofiy compare the 
sounds and consonances which are heard 
only, and their labor, like that of the astron- 
omer, is in vain. . . . They investigate the 
numbers of the harmonies which are heard, 
but they never attain to problems — that is to 
say, they never reach the natural harmonies of 
numbers, or reflect why some numbers are 
harmonious and others not. ... A thing 
which I would call useful ; that is, if sought 
after with a view to the beautiful and good ; 
but if pursued in any other spirit, useless. 

And so we have at last arrived at the 



1 2 El hie a tion a I Nuggets. 

hymn of Dialectic [Philosophy]. This is of 
that strain which is of the intellect only, . . . 
this power of elevating the highest principle 
in the soul to the contemplation of that 
which is best in existence — this power is 
given by all that study and pursuit of the 
arts which has been described. . . . Dialec- 
tic, then, is the coping-stone of the sciences, 
and set over them ; no other science can be 
placed higher — the nature of knowledge can 
no further go. 

Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold 
fast ever to the heavenly way and follow 
after justice and virtue always, considering 
that the soul is immortal and able to endure 
every sort of good and every sort of evil. 
Thus shall we live dear to one another 
and to the gods, both while remaining here 
and when, like conquerors in the games who 
go round to gather gifts, we receive our re- 
ward. And it shall be well with us, both 
in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thou- 
sand years. 



ARISTOTLE. 

" The great master of all the peculiarities of nature 
and of men, the eager investigator .... the mighty 

Aristotle."— EwALD, 

From " The Politics."i 

Men must engage in business and go to 
war, but leisure and peace are better ; they 
must do what is necessary and useful, but 
what is honorable is better. In such princi- 
ples children and persons of every age which 
requires education should be trained. 

In men reason and mind are the end 
towards which nature strives, so that the 
birth and moral discipline of the citizens 
ought to be ordered with a view to them. 

The directors of education, as they are 
termed, should be careful what tales or 
stories the children hear, for the sports of 
children are designed to prepare the way for 



1 The Politics. Translated by B. Jowett. Ox- 
ford : Clarendon Press, 1883. 



14 Educational Nuggets. 

work which they will have to do when they 
are grown up. . . . Did you never observe 
in the arts how the potter's boys look on and 
help long before they touch the wheel ? 

The power and capacity of learning exists 
in the soul already ; and, just as the eye is 
unable to turn from darkness to light with- 
out the whole body, so too the instrument 
of knowledge can only by the movement of 
the whole soul be turned from the world of 
becoming into that of being, and learn by 
degrees to endure the sight of being, and of 
the brightest and best of being, or in other 
words, of the good. 

What sort of knowledge is there which 
would draw the soul from becoming to be- 
ing? .... We shall have to take some- 
thing which is not special but of universal 
application ; a something which all arts, 
sciences and intelligences use in common, 
and which every one first has to learn 
among the elements of education — the little 
matter of distinguishing one, two, or three — 
in a word, number and calculation. . . . 



Aristotle. 1 5 



kinds of knowledge as will be useful to them 
without vulgarizing them. And any occupa- 
tion, art, or science, which makes the body or 
soul or mind of the freeman less fit for the 
practice or exercise of virtue, is vulgar. 

To be always seeking after the useful does 
not become free and exalted souls. 

Two principles have to be kept in view, 
what is possible, what is becoming : at these 
every man ought to aim. 

Education should be based upon three 
principles — the Mean [moderate], the Possi- 
ble, the Becoming [decorous], these three. 



JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU 

" The spirit of education which fills and animates 
the work has shaken to their foundations and purified 
all the school rooms, and even the nurseries, in Eu- 
rope."— Jean Paul Friederich Richter. 

From " Emile."^ 

Introduction by the Translator. 

In education, there have been recurring 
periods when some partial thought has se- 
cured such domination that wholesome train- 
ing has become impossible, till a reformer 
appears who restores the lost equilibrium, 
and then very likely he inaugurates a move- 
ment which leads up to another catastrophe. 

At times education becomes almost wholly 
" livresque," devoted to the study of books 
and words rather than of things, and at 



I Rousseau's Emile ; or Treatise on Education. 
Abridged, Translated, and Annotated by William 
H. Payne, Ph.D., L.L.D. A volume in "The 
International Education Series.'" New York : D, 
Appleton & Co. 1895. 



Educational Nuggets. 



others it becomes mainly literary or humanis- 
tic, to the neglect of the study of matter. 

The records of human thought, sentiment 
and achievement form one term of the con- 
trast, while matter and its phenomena, under 
the term Nature, constitute the other. 
Ever since education began to have a his- 
tory human thought has oscillated with 
almost rhythmical movement from one of 
these poles to the other, but with a general 
tendency toward the study of letters ; and 
so it has usually happened that educational 
reform has invited a return to Nature, and 
has sounded a warning against books and 
words. 

Let us make a summary analysis of the 
education that Rousseau would have substi- 
tuted for that which he covers with his con- 
demnation. . . . 

I. Education should be natural. . . . 
A return to Nature is a return to simplicity. 
There is much truth in Rousseau's saying, 



Jean Jacques Rousseau. 1 9 

that we no longer know how to be simple 
in anything. Look at the countless devices 
and machines for teaching a child how to 
read ! What useless lumber ! Create in the 
child a desire to read, and all this apparatus 
is of no account ; the process becomes sim- 
plified to the last degree, and the child can- 
not be held back from learning how to read. 

To follow Nature also signifies to return 
to reality. There may be formal teaching 
just as there is formal logic, both arts being 
occupied with symbols and not with reali- 
ties. The universal teaching instrument is 
language, and the use of symbols is unavoid- 
able, but teacher and pupil should under- 
stand that these symbols must be vitalized 
by a content. 

To follow Nature is to resort to personal 
experience rather than to follow authority ; 
it is to gain knowledge at first hand rather 
than to accept the results of other men's ex- 
perience. As Rousseau puts it in a con- 
crete way, '' The child is not to learn science, 
but to discover it." This is akin to the 



Educational Nuggets. 



dogma of Socrates, " Science can not be 
taught, only drawn out." This doctrine has 
been pushed to its furthest hmit by Mr. Spen- 
cer, who makes education consist in the pro- 
cess of rediscovery, and requires each child 
to reproduce the experiences of the race. 

To trust to mere authority altogether is 
absurd ; it is to forego the pleasure of living, 
and in an important sense to cease to be a 
man : but to renounce authority altogether, 
and to depend for our knowledge wholly on 
our own experience, is simply impossible, 
and if possible, would be very absurd. 
There is evidently a middle ground which 
leaves a wide field for personal experience, 
and at the same time allows the individual 
to give almost indefinite extension to his 
knowledge by appropriating the accumulated 
experiences of the race. 

Simplify your methods as much as possi- 
ble ; distrust the artificial aids that compli- 
cate the process of learning ; bring your 
pupil face to face with reality; connect 
symbol with substance ; make learning, so 



Jean Jacques Rousseau. 2 1 

far as possible, a process of personal dis- 
covery ; depend as little as possible on mere 
authority. This is my interpretation of 
Rousseau's precept, " Follow Nature." 

II. Education should be progressive — ■ 
The mind, like the body, passes through 
successive stages of growth, and in both 
cases the transition from one stage to the 
next indicates a corresponding change in 
treatment. . . . Infancy is a little world so 
peculiar in nature and need as to be virtually 
cut off from the succeeding stage of life, 
and hence requires a treatment peculiarly 
its own. . . . The next section of human 
life is childhood. The child has his peculiar 
nature and needs ; the treatment due an 
infant must be abandoned, and a new 
system adopted in conformity with the 
nature of this new creature. 

Boyhood follows childhood, and manhood, 
in turn, succeeds boyhood. These are suc- 
cessive, and in some sense independent, sec- 
tions of human life, and so peculiar in nature 
and need as to require modes of treatment 
specifically different. 



22 Educational Nuggets. 

This, in outline, is Rousseau's theory of 
progressive education. The obvious thing 
to be said of it is that it is so systematic and 
artificial as to be unnatural. 

Education should be progressive in the 
same sense and to the same degree that life 
and growth are progressive ; not progressive 
in the sense of an abrupt winding up of a 
lower system of regimen and an equally 
abrupt inauguration of a higher, but progres- 
sive in the actual wholesome sense of insen- 
sible ascent and modification. 

III. Education should be 7iegative. . . . 
Rousseau believed that as education was 
administered in the schools of his day there 
was a vast disproportion between the mass 
of knowledge accumulated and the child's 
power to comprehend and use it ; and so, in 
his usual aphoristic style, he says that the 
important thing in education is not to gain 
time, but to lose it, and that he would prefer 
that fimile should reach his twelfth year 
without knowing his right hand from his 
left, or right from wrong. 



Jean Jacques Rousseau. 23 

Here as elsewhere we shall fail in our 
interpretation of Rousseau if we do more or 
less than catch the general spirit of his 
paradox. 

If, in imitation of Rousseau, I were to try 
my hand at a paradox, I would say, in this 
connection, that useless knowledge is some- 
times the most useful ; meaning by this that 
the subjects that are best for pure training 
are sometimes of the least value for practical 
purposes. Algebra and geometry are in- 
stances of this ; they are incomparable dis- 
cipUnes, but the average student derives 
only very little advantage from the knowledge 
that is acquired while the discipline is in 
progress. 

Again, by making education negative, or, 
as Rousseau says to the same purpose, by 
losing time rather than by trying to gain it, 
we extend the period of childhood and 
allow the pupil to lead a sort of vegetative 
life, which Froebel seems to have had in 
mind when be conceived the occupations 
and gifts at the kindergarten. 



24 Educational Nuggets. 

The Amile has justly been called the 
Gospel of Childhood. If it had no other 
claims to consideration it would deserve the 
homage of parents and teachers by reason 
of that sacredness with which it invests the 
personality of every child. In what other 
book of human origin can we find such com- 
passion for the weakness of childhood, such 
tender regard for its happiness, and such 
touching pleas for its protection and guid- 
ance } What other book has ever recalled 
mothers to a sense of their duties with such 
pathos and effect? The Emile has made 
the ministry of the school-room as sacred as 
the ministry of the altar ; and by unfolding 
the mysteries of his art and disclosing the 
secret of his power, it has made the teacher's 
office one of honor and respect. 

The power of the book lies in its general 
spirit rather than in any doctrine or method 
which it embodies. If read with kindly 
feeling and without prejudice, it cannot fail 
to inspire teachers with the noblest ambition, 
and to quicken their methods with living 
power. 



EMILE. 

Author s Preface. 

We do not know childhood. Acting on 
the false ideas we have of it, the farther we 
go the farther we wander from the right 
path. Those who are wisest are attached 
to what is important for men to know, with- 
out considering what children are able to 
apprehend. They are always looking for 
the man in the child, without thinking of 
what he was before he became a man. . . . 
Begin, then, by studying your pupils more 
thoroughly, for it is very certain that you do 
not know them. 

Iiifmicy — General Principles. 

People pity the lot of a child ; they do not 
see that the human race would have perished 
if man had not begun by being a child. 

We are born weak ; we have need of 
strength : we are born stupid ; we have 
need of judgment. All that we have not 



26 Educational Nuggets. 

at our birth, but which we need when we 
are grown, is given us by education. 

The natural man is complete in himself ; 
he is the numerical unit, the absolute whole, 
who is related only to himself or to his 
fellow-man. Civilized man is but a fractional 
unit that is dependent upon its denominator, 
and whose value consists in its relation to 
the whole, which is the social organization. 

What would a man be worth for others 
who had been educated solely for himself ? 

In the natural order of things, all men 
being equal, their common vocation is man- 
hood, and whoever is well trained for that 
cannot fulfill badly any vocation connected 
with it. Whether my pupil be destined for 
the army, the church, or the bar, concerns 
me but little. Regardless of the vocation of 
his parents, nature summons him to the 
duties of human life. To live, is the trade 
I wish to teach him. 

Ever since mothers, despising their first 
duty, have been no longer willing to nourish 



Amile. 



27 



their own children, they must be entrusted 
to hireling nurses, who, thus finding them- 
selves mothers to others' children for whom 
the voice of nature did not plead, have felt 
no anxiety but to rid themselves of their 
burdens. 

Where there is no mother there can be no 
child. Their duties are reciprocal ; and if 
they are badly fulfilled on one side, they will 
be neglected on the other. 

But a woman may miss the right way by 
taking an opposite course : when, instead of 
neglecting her motherly duties, she carries 
them to an extreme ; when she makes of her 
child her idol ; when she augments and 
nourishes his weakness in order to prevent 
him from feeling it. 

Observe Nature, and follow the route 
which she traces for you. . . . She is ever 
exciting children to activity ; she hardens the 
constitution by trials of every sort. 

Experience shows that there are more 
deaths among children delicately reared 



28 Educational Nuggets. 

than among others. Provided the strength 
of children is not overtaxed, there is less 
risk in using it than in preventing its use. 

A father who merely feeds and clothes 
the children he has begotten so far fulfills 
but a third of his task. To the race, he 
owes men ; to society, men of social disposi- 
tions ; and to the state, citizens. Every 
man who can pay this triple debt and does 
not pay it, is guilty of a crime, and the 
more guilty, perhaps, when the debt is only 
half paid. He who can not fulfill the duties 
of a father has no right to become such. 

Men were not made to be massed together 
in herds, but to be scattered over the earth 
which they are to cultivate. The more they 
herd together the more they corrupt one 
another. . . . The breath of man is fatal to 
his fellows ; this is no less true literally than 
figuratively. 

Cities are the graves of the human species. 
After a few generations, races perish or 
degenerate ; they must be renewed, and this 
regeneration is always supplied by the coun- 



^jni'le. 29 

try. Send your children away, therefore, so 
that they may renew themselves, so to speak, 
and regain, amid the fields, the vigor they 
have lost in the unwholesome air of places 
too thickly peopled. 

The education of man begins at his birth. 
Before he can speak, before he can under- 
stand, he is already instructing himself. 
Experience precedes lessons ; the moment 
he knows his nurse he has already acquired 
much knowledge. We should be surprised 
at the knowledge possessed by the most 
boorish man, if we followed his progress 
from the moment of birth to the present 
hour of his life. If we were to divide all 
human knowledge into two parts, one com- 
mon to all men and the other restricted to 
scholars, the last would be very small com- 
pared with the first. 

When a child weeps he is in a state of 
discomfort ; he has some need which he can 
not satisfy. We look about in search of 
this need, and when we have found it pro- 
vide for it. 



30 Educational Nuggets. 

The first tears of children are prayers, and 
unless we are on our guard they soon be- 
come orders. Children begin by being 
assisted, but end by being served. . . . And 
already we begin to sec why, in this early 
period of life, it is important to discern the 
secret intention which dictates the gesture 
or the cry. 

A child wishes to disarrange whatever he 
sees ; he breaks and injures whatever he can 
reach ; he seizes a bird as he would a stone, 
and strangles it without knowing what he 
•does. . . . Whether he makes or unmakes 
matters not ; it suffices that he changes the 
state of things, and every change is an 
action. Though he seems to have a greater 
inclination to destroy, this is not through 
badness. The activity which forms is al- 
ways slow; and' as that which destroys is 
more rapid, it is better adapted to his vivac- 
ity. 

Fro7n the Age of Five to Twelve. 
It is through the sensible effects of signs 
that children judge of their meaning ; for 



^rnile. 31 

them, there is no other convention. What- 
ever ill may befall the child, it is very rare 
that he cries when he is alone, at least if he 
has no hope of being heard. 

If he falls and bumps his head, if his nose 
bleeds, or if he cuts his fingers, instead of 
rushing to him with an air of alarm, I re- 
main unmoved, at least for a little time. . . . 
In reality it is not so much the cut, but the 
fear, which torments him when he is 
wounded. I will at least spare him this 
last suffering; for most certainly he will 
judge of his misfortune as he sees that I 
judge of it. 

As children grow in strength, complaining 
is less necessary for them. . . . Along with 
their growth in power there is developed the 
knowledge which puts them in a condition to 
direct it. It is at this second stage that the 
life of the individual properly begins. It is 
then that he takes knowledge of himself. 
Memory diffuses the feeling of identity over 
all the moments of his existence. He be- 
comes truly one, the same, and consequently 



32 Educational Ntiggets, 

already capable of happiness or misery. It 
is important, then, that we begin to con- 
sider him here as a moral being. 

Love childhood ; encourage its sports, its 
pleasures, its amiable instincts. Who of 
you has not sometimes looked back with 
regret on that age when a smile was ever 
on the lips, when the soul was ever at peace ? 
Why would you take from those little inno- 
cents the enjoyment of a time so short which 
is slipping from them, and of a good so 
precious which they can not abuse .'* 

When he can ask for what he wants in 
words, and when, in order to obtain it more 
quickly, or to overcome a refusal, he supple- 
ments his demands with tears, it ought to 
be firmly refused him. 

It is important always to grant at the first 
intimation what we do not mean to refuse. 

Childhood has its own way of seeing, 
thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more 
foolish than to try to substitute our own for 
them. I would as soon require a child to 



Emzle, 33 

be five feet in height as to have judgment 
at the age of ten. 

Whatever you allow him to do, allow him 
to do it at the first suggestion, without soU- 
citation, especially without entreaty and 
without conditions. Give your assent with 
cheerfulness, and never refuse save with 
reluctance ; but let all your refusals be irrev- 
ocable. 

Punishment must never be inflicted on 
children as a punishment, but it ought always 
to come to them as the natural consequence 
of their bad acts. 

Rattle-headed children become common- 
place men, I know of no observation more 
general and more certain than this. No- 
thing is more difficult than to distinguish, in 
infancy, real stupidity from that apparent 
and deceptive stupidity which is the indica- 
tion of strong characters. . . . During his 
infancy the younger Cato seemed an imbe- 
cile in the family. He was taciturn and ob- 
stinate, and this was all the judgment that 



34 Educational Nuggets. 

was formed of him. . . . Oh, how Uable to 
be deceived are they who are so precipitate 
in their judgments of children ! . . . . Re- 
spect childhood, and do not hastily judge of 
it either for good or for evil. Allow a long 
time for the exceptions to be manifested, 
proved, and confirmed, before adopting 
special methods for them. Allow Nature to 
act in her place, for fear of thwarting her 
operations. 

The apparent facility with which children 
learn is the cause of their ruin. We do not 
see that this very facility is the proof that 
they are learning nothing. Their smooth 
and polished brain reflects like a mirror 
the objects that are presented to it ; but no- 
thing remains, nothing penetrates it. 

If Nature gives to a child's brain that plas- 
ticity which renders it capable of receiving 
all sorts of impressions, it is not for the pur- 
pose of engraving upon it the names of kings, 
dates, terms in heraldry, astronomy, and 
geography, and all those words without any 
meaning for his age, and without any utility 



£??iile. 35 

for any age whatever, with which his sad 
and barren infancy is harassed ; but it is in 
order that all the ideas which he can con- 
ceive and which are useful to him, all those 
which relate to his happiness, and are one 
day to enlighten him as to his duties, may 
be traced there at an early hour in ineffacea- 
ble characters, and may serve him for self- 
conduct during his whole life in a manner 
adapted to his being and to his faculties. 

To exercise the senses is not merely to 
make use of them, but it is to learn how to 
judge by them ; and it is also, so to speak, 
to learn how to feel, for we neither know 
how to touch, nor to see, nor to hear, save 
as we have been taught. 

Do not exercise the child's strength alone, 
but call into exercise all the senses which di- 
rect it. Draw from each of them all the 
advantage possible, and then employ one to 
verify the impression made by another. 
Measure, count, weigh, compare, and do 
not employ force till after having estimated 
the resistance. 



36 Educational Nuggets. 



Do not reason with one whom you would 
cure of the horror of darkness ; but take 
him often into dark places, and you may be 
sure that this practice is worth more than all 
the arguments of philosophy. Tilers on 
roofs do not become dizzy, and no one who 
is accustomed to being in darkness is any 
longer afraid of it. 

Nothing is so cheerful as darkness. 
Never shut up your child in a black hole. 
Let him laugh as he goes into the darkness, 
and let him laugh again when he comes out 
of it. 

Children, who are great imitators, all try 
their hand at drawing. I would have my 
pupil cultivate this art, not exactly for the 
art itself, but for rendering the eye accurate 
and the hand flexible. ... He shall have 
no master but Nature, and no models but 
objects. He shall have before his eyes the 
very original, and not the paper which repre- 
sents it ; he shall draw a house from a house, 
a tree from a tree, a man from a man. . . . 
I shall discourage him even from tracing 



Entile. 37 

anything from memory in the absence of ob- 
jects, until, by frequent observations, their 
exact figures are firmly impressed on his 
imagination : for fear that, substituting odd 
and fantastic forms for the truth of things, 
he lose the knowledge of proportions and 
the taste for all the beauties of Nature. 

Fro?)i Twelve to Fifteen. 
Although the whole course of life up to 
adolescence is a period of weakness, there is 
a point in the course of this first stage of 
life when, growth in power having surpassed 
the growth of needs, the growing animal, 
still absolutely weak, becomes relatively 
strong. All his needs not being developed, 
his actual powers are more than sufficient to 
provide for those which he has. As a man 
he would be very weak, but as a child he is 
very strong. 

He whose strength exceeds his desires 
has some power to spare ; he is certainly a 
very strong being. This is the third stage 
of childhood, and the one of which I have 
now to speak. 



38 Educational Nuggets. 

At first, children are merely restless, then 
they are curious ; and this curiosity, well di- 
rected, is the motive power of the age which 
we have now reached. 

Make your pupil attentive to natural phe- 
nomena, and you will soon make him curi- 
ous : . . . . In your search for the laws of 
Nature, always begin with the most common 
and the most obvious phenomena, and ac- 
custom your pupil not to take these phenom- 
ena for reasons, but for facts. 

As soon as he comes to have sufficient 
knowledge of himself to conceive in what 
his welfare consists, as soon as he can grasp 
relations sufficiently to judge of what is 
best and what is not best for him, from that 
moment he is in a condition to feel the dif- 
ference between work and play, and to re- 
gard the second merely as a respite from the 
first. Then objects of real utility may enter 
into his studies, and may invite him to give 
to them a more constant application than he 
gave to simple amusements. 

The law of necessity, always reappearing, 



Amile. 39 

teaches man from an early hour to do what 
does not please him, in order to prevent 
an evil which would be more displeasing. 
Such is the use of foresight ; and from this 
foresight, well or badly regulated, springs all 
human wisdom or all human misery. 

As soon as we succeeded in giving our 
pupil an idea of the word useful, we have 
another strong hold for governing him ; for 
this word makes a strong impression on him, 
provided he has only an idea of it in propor- 
tion to his age, and clearly sees how it is re- 
lated to his actual welfare. . . . What is 
this good for ? Henceforth this is the con- 
secrated word, the decisive word between 
him and me in all the transactions of our 
life. 

When one has been taught, as his most 
important lesson, to desire nothing in the 
way of knowledge save what is useful, he 
asks questions like Socrates ; he does not ask 
a question without framing for himself its 
answer, which he knows will be demanded of 
him before resolving it. 



40 Educational Nuggets. 

To render a young man judicious, we must 
carefully form his judgments instead of dic- 
tating to him our own. 

The art of the teacher consists in never 
allowing his observations to bear on minutiae 
which serve no purpose, but ever to confront 
the child with the wide relations which he 
must one day know in order to judge cor- 
rectly of the order, good and bad, of civil 
society. 

Outside of society, an isolated man, owing 
nothing to any one, has a right to live as he 
pleases ; but in society, where he necessarily 
lives at the expense of others, he owes them 
in labor the price of his support ; to this there 
is no except'on. To work, then, is a duty 
indispensable to social man. Rich or poor, 
powerful or weak, every idle citizen is a 
knave. 

By causing to pass in review before a child 
the productions of Nature and art, by stimu- 
lating his curiosity and following it where it 
leads, we have the advantage of studying 



his tastes, his inclinations, and his propen- 
sities, and to see glitter the first spark of his 
genius, if he has genius of any decided sort. 

But a common error, and one from which 
we must preserve ourselves, is to attribute to 
the ardor of talent the effect of the occasion, 
and to take for a marked inclination toward 
such or such an art the imitative spirit which 
is common to man and monkey, and which 
mechanically leads both to wish to do what- 
ever they see done without knowing very 
well what it is good for. 

The great secret of education is to make 
the exercises of the body and of the mind 
always serve as a recreation for each other. 

Emile [at fifteen] has little knowledge, but 
what he has is really his own ; he knows 
nothing by halves. 

He has a mind that is universal, not 
through its knowledge, but through its facil- 
ity of acquiring it ; a mind that is open, 
intelligent, ready for everything, and, as 



42 Educational Nuggets. 

Montaigne says, if not taught, at least teach- 
able. It is sufficient for me that he can find 
the What profits it of everything he does, 
and the Why of everything he believes. 

From Fifteen to Twenty. 

The study proper for man is that of his 
relations. While he knov^s himself only 
through his physical being, he ought to 
study himself through his relation w^ith 
things, and this is the occupation of his 
childhood ; but when he begins to feel his 
moral nature, he ought to study himself 
through his relations w^ith men, and this is 
the occupation of his entire life, beginning at 
the point we have now reached. 



JOHANN FRIEDERICH 
HERBART. 

" A psychologist of the first rank, the founder, some 
would call him, of modern psychology." — Oscar 
Browning. 

The Science of Education. ^ 
Introduction. 
The whole power of what humanity has 
felt, experienced, and thought, is the true 
and right educator, to which the boy is en- 
titled, and the teacher is given to him merely 
that he may help him by intelligent inter- 
pretation and elevating companionship. 
Thus to present the whole treasure of ac- 
cumulated research in a concentrated form 
to the youthful generation, is the highest 



1 The Science of Education: Its General Principles 
Deduced from its A im, etc.— By Johann Friederich 
Herbart. Translated from the German, with a Bio- 
graphical Introduction by Henry M. and Emmie 
Felkin, and a Preface by Oscar Browning, M. A., 
King's College, Cambridge. American publishers, 
Boston, Mass. : D. C. Heath & Co. 



44 Educational Nuggets. i 

. j 

service which mankind at any period of its 
existence can render to its successors. 

The first, though by no means the com- 
plete science of the educator, would be a 
psychology in which the total possibilities of 
human activity were sketched out a priori. 
I think I recognize the difficulty as well as 
the possibility of such a science. Long will 
it be before we have it, longer still before we | 
can expect it from teachers. Never, how- 
ever, can it be a substitute for observation of i 
the pupil ; the individual can only be discov- j 

ered, not deduced, ! 

I 

Character is inner stability, and how can a ^ 
human being take root in himself, when he is 
not allowed to depend on anything, when 
you do not permit him to trust a single | 
decision to his own will ? ' 

In most cases it happens, that the youth- : 
ful soul has in its depths a sacred corner, , 
into which you never penetrate, and in which, 
notwithstanding your rough treatment, it i 
lives for itself, dreams, hopes, and evolves ,| 

i 
i 



Johann Friederich Herbart. 45 

plans which will be tried at the first opportu- 
nity, and if successful will base a character, 
just on the very spot you did not know. 
This is the reason why the aim and the re- 
sult of education are wont to have so little 
connection. 

Those only wield the full power of educa- 
tion, who know how to cultivate in the 
youthful soul a large circle of thought closely 
connected in all its parts, possessing the 
power of overcoming what is unfavorable 
in the environment, and of dissolving and 
absorbing into itself all that is favorable. 

The Aim of Education. 

Government which is satisfied without 
education, oppresses the mind, and educa- 
tion which takes no heed of the disorderly 
conduct of children, would not be recognized 
as such by the children themselves. 

The first measure that all government 
has to take is the threat of punishment, and 
in its use all government runs the danger of 
striking on one of two rocks : on the one 



46 Educational Nuggets. 

side there are strong natures who despise 
all threats, and dare everything to gain their 
will ; on the other there are natures — a far 
greater number — who are too weak to be 
impressed by threats, and in whom fear 
itself is subservient to desire. 

Suffice it briefly to remember that punctil- 
ious and constant supervision is burdensome 
alike to the supervisor and those he watches 
over, and is apt therefore to be associated 
on both sides with deceit, and thrown off at 
every opportunity — and also that the need 
for it grows with the degree in which it is 
used, and that at last every moment of its 
intermittence is fraught with danger. 

I pass to the means of help which must 
be prepared in the children's minds them- 
selves by government — I mean authority and 
love. 

The mind bends to authority : . . . . But 
authority is only obtained through superior- 
ity of mind, and this, as is well known, can- 
not be reduced to rules. It must act inde- 
pendently, without reference to education. 



Johann Friederich Herbart. 47 

Love depends on the harmony of the feel- 
ings and on habit. . . . The harmony of 
feelings love demands, may arise in two 
ways. Either the teacher enters into the 
feelings of the pupil, and without permitting 
it to be noticed, joins in them with tact, or 
he takes care that the feelings of the pupil 
can approach his own in some particular 
way. 

Authority belongs most naturally to the 
father. . . . Love belongs most naturally to 
the mother. ... If then authority and love 
are the best means of maintaining the effect 
of the child's earliest subjection, so far as its 
further government requires, it then of ne- 
cessity follows, firstly, that this government 
will be best left in the hands of those to 
whom nature has intrusted it. 

The fashioner of the mind, in whom at 
best only an ever limited trust is placed, 
should not in his pride desire to carry on his 
profession by himself alone, to the exclusion 
of the parents ; he would thereby lose the 



48 



power of their influence, for the loss of 
which he cannot easily find a compensation. 

If, however, the government of children 
must devolve on persons other than the 
parents, it is important to carry it on with as 
little friction as possible. This depends on 
the proportion which the children's activity 
bears to the amount of free play they get. . . . 
When the environment is so arranged, that 
childish activity can itself find the track of 
the useful and spend itself thereon, then 
government is most successful. 

Instant obedience following a command on 
the spot and with entire acquiescence, which 
teachers, not wholly without reason, look 
upon as their triumph — who w^ould force 
this from children by merely cramping regu- 
lations as well as military severity ? Such 
obedience can only in reason be associated 
with the child's own will : this, however, is 
only to be expected as the result of a some- 
what advanced stage of genuine education. 

Education proper is cognizant, like govern- 



Johan?t Friederich Herb art. 49 

ment, of something which may be called 
compulsion ; it is indeed never harsh, but 
often very strict. . . . Education makes 
itself quite as oppressive, though less abruptly 
so, by constantly exacting that which is un- 
willingly done, and by obstinately ignoring 
the wishes of the pupil. 

The sour-tempered person who is insensi- 
ble to this feeling [sympathy with youth] 
would do better to avoid the young — he does 
not so much as understand how to look at 
them with proper consideration. Only he 
who receives much, and is therefore able to 
give much, can also deprive of much, and by 
such pressure mould the disposition and 
direct the attention of the youthful mind 
according to his own judgment. 

Let there be no wearisome sulkiness, no 
artificial gravity, no mystical reserve, and, 
above all, no false friendliness. Honesty 
must be the soul of all activity, however 
numerous its changes of direction may be. 

The pupil will have to test the teacher in 



50 Educational Nuggets. 

many ways, before there grows up that 
subtle tractability which ought to spring 
from mere knowledge of, and regard for his 
feelings. When, however, it is manifested, 
the teacher's attitude must be more stead- 
fast, more equable ; he must not lay himself 
open to the suspicion that no enduring 
relationship is possible with him, or that his 
heart is not a safe resting-place. 

It is before all things necessary to observe 
the manner in which moral culture is related 
to the other parts of culture, that is to say, 
how it (moral culture) presupposes them as 
conditions from which alone it can with cer- 
tainty be developed. Unprejudiced persons 
will, I hope, easily see that the problem of 
moral education is not separable from edu- 
cation as a whole, but that it stands in a 
necessary, far-reaching connection with the 
remaining problems of education. 

The kingdom of the pupil's future aims at 
once divides itself for us into the province 
of merely possible aims which he might 
perhaps take up at one time or other and 



Johann Friederich Her bar i. 51 

pursue in greater or less degree as he wishes 
— and into the entirely distinct province of 
the 7iecessa?y aims which he would never 
pardon himself for having neglected. In 
one word, the aim of education is sub- 
divided according to the aims of choice — not 
of the teacher, nor of the boy, but of the 
future man, and the aims of ?norality. 

(i) How can the teacher assume for him- 
self beforehand the merely possible future 
aims of the pupil ? . . . . We call the first 
part of the educational aim — many-sided7iess 
of interest, which must be distinguished 
from its exaggeration — dabbling in many 
things. And since no one object of will, 
nor its individual direction, interests us 
more than any other, we add to this, lest 
weakness may offend us by appearing by the 
side of strength, the "f^x^^Xo-dX^— proportion- 
ate many-sidedness. 

(2) How is the teacher to assume for 
himself the ?iecessary aims of the pupil } 
.... That the ideas of the right and good 
in all their clearness and purity may become 



52 Educational Nuggets. 

the essential objects of the will, that the 
innermost intrinsic contents of the character 
— the very heart of the personality — shall 
determine itself according to these ideas, 
putting back all arbitrary impulses — this and 
nothing less is the aim of moral culture. 

The teacher aims at the universal ; the 
pupil, however, is an individual human 
being. . . . We know how beneficial it is 
for mankind, that different men should 
resolve upon and prepare for different work. 
Moreover, the individuality -of the youth 
reveals itself more and more under the 
teacher's efforts. . . . Out of all this there 
results a negative rule in relation to the aim 
of education, which is as important as it is 
difficult to observe, /. e., to leave the individ- 
uality untouched as far as possible. 

Is individtiality consistent with ma7iy- 
sidedness ? . . . Our chief business is to dis- 
tinguish most carefully between the different 
chief concepts, /'. <?., many-sidedness, inter- 
est, character, morality — for on them must 



Johanti Fi'iederich Her bar t. 53 

be directed all the labor which we propose to 
expend. 

[Character] is will, and w^e mean will in 
the strict sense, which is far different from 
variations of temper or desire, for these are 
not determined, while the will on the contrary 
is. 

The kind of the determination constitutes 
the character. Willing — determination- 
takes place in consciousness. Individuality, 
on the other hand, is unconscious. It is the 
mysterious root to which our psychological 
heredity refers everything which, according 
to circumstances, comes out ever differently 
in human beings. 

Character, then, almost inevitably expresses 
itself in opposition to individuality by conflict. 

For it is simple and steadfast ; individual- 
ity, on the contrary, continually sends forth 
from its depths other and new thoughts and 
desires. 

Many-sidedness has neither sex, nor rank, 
nor age. With mental feelers everywhere, 



54 Educational Nuggets. 

with ever-ready sensation, it suits men and 
girls, children and women ; . . . . Intol- 
erance is in its eyes the only crime. . . . 
Nothing is new to it ; but everything remains 
fresh. Custom, prejudice, aversion, and 
torpor disturb it not. 

Interest arises from interesting objects 
and occupations. Many-sided interest origi- 
nates in the wealth of these. To create and 
develop this interest is the task of instruction, 
which carries on and completes the prepara- 
tion begun by intercourse and experience. 

Many-sidedness of Interest, 

He who has at any time given himself up 
con amore to any object of human activity 
understands what concentration means. . . . 
Personality rests on the unity of conscious- 
ness, on co-ordination, on Reflection. . . . 
These processes cannot be contemporaneous : 
they must therefore follow one upon the 
other ; we get first one act of concentration, 
then another, then their meeting in Reflection. 

We must not do more here in the name of 



Johann Friederich Her bar t. 55 

many-sidedness than show generally the 
necessity of reflection. To know beforehand 
in what manner it is composed on every oc- 
casion of such concentrations would be the 
business of psychology ; to feel it by antici- 
pation is the essence of educational tact, the 
most precious treasure of the art of educa- 
tion. 

Interest, which in common with desire, 
will, and the esthetic judgment, stands op- 
posed to indifference, is distinguished from 
those three, in that it neither controls nor 
disposes of its object, but depends upon it. 
It is true that we are inwardly active be- 
cause we are interested, but externally we 
are passive till interest passes into desire or 
volition. 

The object of interest can never be iden- 
tical with that which is in reality desired. 
For the desires, while they would fain grasp, 
strive towards some future object which they 
do not already possess ; interest, on the other 
hand, unfolds itself in observation, and clings 
to the contemplated presetit. Interest only 



56 Educational Nuggets. 

rises above mere perception in that what it 
perceives possesses the mind by preference, 
and makes itself felt among the remaining 
perceptions by virtue of a certain causality. 

It is inglorious to be absorbed by desires, 
and yet more inglorious to be absorbed by a 
multiplicity of desires. „ . . Patient interest, 
on the contrary, can never become too rich, 
and the richest interest will be the most ready 
to remain patient. In it the character pos- 
sesses a facility in accomplishing its resolves, 
which accompanies it everywhere, without 
frustrating its plans by pretentiousness. 

To leave man to Nature, or even to wish to 
lead him to, and train him up in. Nature is 
merely folly. « » o We know our aim. Na- 
ture does much to aid us, and humanity has 
gathered much on the road she has already 
traversed ; it is our task to join them together. 

From Nature man attains to knowledge 
through experience, and to sympathy through 
intercourse. . . . Experience and intercourse 
are often wearisome, and we must sometimes 



/ohann Friedertch Her bar t. 57 

bear it. But the pupil must never be con- 
demned to suffer this from the teacher. To 
be wearisome is the cardinal sin of instruc- 
tion ; it is the privilege of instruction to fly 
over steppes and morasses, and if it cannot 
always wander in pleasant valleys, it can 
train on the other hand in mountain climb- 
ing and reward with the wider prospect. 

Instruction must universally point out, 
connect, teach, philosophize. In matters ap- 
pertaining to sympathy it should be observ- 
ing, continuous, elevating, active in the 
sphere of reality. 

Symbols are to instruction an obvious bur- 
den which, if not lightened by the power of 
interest in the thing symbolized, throws both 
teacher and pupil out of the track of pro- 
gressive culture. . . . Make therefore a stand 
as long as possible against every instruction 
in language without exception, which does 
not directly lie on the high road of the cul- 
ture of interest. Whether ancient or mod- 
ern language it is all the same. That book 
alone has a claim to be read which interests 



58 Educational Nuggets. 

now, and can prepare the way for fresh in- 
terest in the future. 

Let every affected manner be banished 
from instruction ! . . . . The teacher must 
be capable of many happy turns, he must 
vary with facility, must adapt himself to op- 
portunity, and while playing with the acci- 
dental must so much the more emphasize the 
essential. 

All mannerisms that compel the listener's 
passivity, and extract from him a painful ne- 
gation of his proper activity, are in themselves 
unpleasant and oppressive. . . . That man- 
ner is the best, which provides the greatest 
amount of freedom within the circle which 
the work in question makes necessary to pre- 
serve. 



HERBERT SPENCER. 

" The work which Herbert Spencer has done in 
organizing the different departments of human know- 
ledge .... is work of the calibre of that which Aristotle 
and Newton did."— John Fiske. 

FROM " EDUCATION." ^ 

What Knowledge Is of Most Worth ? 

How to live? — that is the essential ques- 
tion for us. Not how to live in the mere 
material sense only, but in the widest sense. 
.... how to use all our faculties to the 
greatest advantage of ourselves and others — 
how to live completely. And this being 
the great thing needful for us to learn, is, by 
consequence, the great thing which educa- 
tion has to teach. 

The actions and precautions by which, 



1 Education : Intellectual, Moral, and Physical. By 
Herbert Spencer. New York : D. Appleton & Co. 
(Copyright by D, Appleton & Co., in i860.) 



6o Educatio7ial Nuggets. \ 

from moment to moment, we secure per- 
sonal safety, must clearly take precedence of 

all others. \ 

That next after direct self-preservation ] 

comes the indirect self-preservation which ! 

consists in acquiring the means of living, : 

none will question. ^ 

As the family comes before the State in j 

order of time — as the bringing up of children | 

is possible before the State exists, or when I 

it has ceased to be, whereas the State is ! 

rendered possible only by the bringing up of I 

children ; it follows that the duties of the j 

parent demand closer attention than those of j 

the citizen. i 

Those various forms of pleasurable occu- 
pation which fill up the leisure left by graver 
occupations — the enjoyments of music, 
poetry, painting, &c. — manifestly imply a 

pre-existing society. . . . And, consequently, j 

that part of human conduct which consti- | 

tutes good citizenship is of more moment ' 

than that which goes out in accomplishments I 



Herbert Spencer. 6i 

or exercise of the tastes ; and, in education, 
preparation for the one must rank before 
preparation for the other. 

After making all qualifications, there still 
remain these broadly-marked divisions ; and 
it still continues substantially true that these 
divisions subordinate one another in the 
foregoing order, because the corresponding 
divisions of life make one ^Xioxh^v possible 
in that order. 

Happily, that all-important part of educa- 
tion which goes to secure direct self-preser- 
vation, is in great part already provided for. 
Too momentous to be left to our blunder- 
ing. Nature takes it into her own hands. . . . 
What we are chiefly called upon to see, is 
that there shall be free scope for gaining 
this experience, and receiving this discipline, 
— that there shall be no such thwarting of 
Nature as that by which stupid school-mis- 
tresses commonly prevent the girls in their 
charge from the spontaneous physical activi- 
ties they would indulge in; and so render 



62 Educational Nuggets. 

them comparatively incapable of taking care 
of themselves in circumstances of peril. 

This, hovv^ever, is by no means all that is 
comprehended in the education that prepares 
for direct self-preservation. Besides guard- 
ing the body against mechanical damage or 
destruction, it has to be guarded against in- 
jury from other causes — against the disease 
and death that follow breaches of physiologic 
law. ... If any one doubts the importance 
of an acquaintance with the fundamental 
principles of physiology as a means to 
complete living, let him look around and see 
how many men and women he can find in 
middle or later life who are thoroughly well. 

In all cases [of physical disorder] a per- 
manent damage is done— not immediately 
appreciable, it may be, but still there ; and 
along with other such items which Nature 
in her strict account-keeping never drops, 
will tell against us to the inevitable shorten- 
ing of our days. Through the accumula- 
tion of small injuries it is that the constitu- 



Herbe7't Spencer. 63 

tions are commonly undermined, and break 
down long before their time. 

We infer that as vigorous health and its 
accompanying high spirits are larger ele- 
ments of happiness than any other thing 
whatever, the teaching how to maintain 
them is a teaching that yields in moment to 
no other whatever. And therefore we as- 
sert that such a course of physiology as is 
needful for the comprehension of its general 
truths, and their bearings on daily conduct, 
is an all-essential part of a rational educa- 
tion. 

We need not insist on the value of that 
knowledge which aids indirect self-preserva- 
tion by facilitating the gaining of a liveli- 
hood. 

Leaving out only some very small classes, 
Vv'hat are all men employed in ? They are 
employed in the production, preparation, 
and distribution of commodities. And on 
what does efficiency in the production, prep- 
aration, and distribution of commodities de- 



64 Ediicatiojial Nuggets. 

pend ? It depends on the use of methods 
fitted to the respective natures of these com- 
modities ; it depends on an adequate know- 
ledge of their physical, chemical, or vital 
properties, as the case may be ; that is, it 
depends on science. 

To all such as are occupied in the produc- 
tion, exchange, or distribution of commodi- 
ties, acquaintance with science in some of 
its departments, is of fundamental impor- 
tance. Whoever is immediately or remotely 
implicated in any form of industry (and few 
are not) has a direct interest in understand- 
ing something of the mathematical, physical, 
and chemical properties of things ; perhaps, 
also, has a direct interest in biology ; and 
certainly has in sociology. 

What we call learning a business, really 
implies learning the science involved in it ; 
though not perhaps under the name of sci- 
ence. And hence a grounding in science is 
of great importance, both because it prepares 
for all this, and because rational knowledge 



Herbert Spencer. 65 

has an immense superiority over empirical 
knowledge. 

Is it not an astonishing fact, that though 
on the treatment of offspring depend their 
lives or deaths, and their moral welfare or 
ruin ; yet not one word of instruction on the 
treatment of offspring is ever given to those 
who will hereafter be parents ? Is it not 
monstrous that the fate of a new generation 
should be left to the chances of unreasoning 
custom, impulse, fancy — joined with the sug- 
gestions of ignorant nurses and the preju- 
diced counsel of grandmothers ? 

They [parents] have undertaken to control 
the lives of their offspring from hour to hour ; 
with cruel carelessness they have neglected 
to learn anything about these vital processes 
which they are unceasingly affecting by their 
commands and prohibitions ; in utter igno- 
rance of the simplest physiologic laws, they 
have been year by year undermining the 
constitutions of their children ; and have so 
inflicted disease and premature death, not 
only on them but on their descendants. 



66 Educational Nuggets. 

Equally great are the ignorance and the 
consequent injury, when we turn from phys- 
ical training to moral training. . . . She 
[the young mother] knows nothing about 
the nature of the emotions, their order of 
evolution, their functions, or where use ends 
and abuse begins. She is under the impres- 
sion that some of the feelings are wholly 
bad, which is not true of any one of them ; 
and that others are good, however far they 
may be carried, which is also not true of any 
one of them. And then, ignorant as she 
is of that with which she has to deal, she 
is equally ignorant of the effects that will 
be produced on it by this or that treatment. 

Lacking knowledge of mental phenomena, 
with their causes and consequences, her in- 
terference is frequently more mischievous 
than absolute passivity would have been, . . . 
While insisting on truthfulness she con- 
stantly sets an example of untruth, by 
threatening penalties which she does not 
inflict. While inculcating self-control, she 
hourly visits on her little ones angry scoldings 



Herbert Spe7icer. ^ 6^ 

for acts that do not call for them. She has 
not the remotest idea that in the nursery, as 
in the world, that alone is the truly salutary 
discipline which visits on all conduct, good 
and bad, the natural consequences — the con- 
sequences, pleasurable or painful, which in 
the nature of things such conduct tends to 
bring. 

And then the culture of the intellect — is 
not this, too, mismanaged in a similar man- 
ner ? Grant that the phenomena of intelli- 
gence conform to laws ; grant that the 
evolution of intelligence in a child also 
conforms to laws ; and it follows inevitably 
that education can be rightly guided 
only by a knowledge of these laws. To 
suppose that you can properly regulate 
this process of forming and accumulating 
ideas, without understanding the nature of 
the process, is absurd. How widely, then, 
must teaching as it is, differ from teaching 
as it should be ; when hardly any parents, 
and but few teachers, know anything about 
psychology. 



68 Educational Nuggets. 

Some acquaintance with the first principles 
of physiology and the elementary truths of 
psychology is indispensable for the right 
bringing up of children. 

From the parental functions let us pass 
now to the functions of the citizen. We 
have here to inquire what knowledge best 
fits a man for the discharge of these func- 
tions. 

Were some one to tell you that your 
neighbor's cat kittened yesterday, you would 
say that the information was worthless. 
Fact though it might be, you would say that 
it was an utterly useless fact — a fact that 
could in no way influence your actions in 
life — a fact that would not help you in learn- 
ing how to live completely. Well, apply the 
same test to the great mass of historical 
facts, and you will get the same result. They 
are facts from which no conclusions can be 
dLX2iSS!n—u7i07ganizabIe{?i.zX.'=,\ and therefore 
facts which can be of no service in establish- 
ing principles of conduct, which Is the chief 
use of facts. 



Herbe?'t Spencer. Cg 

Only of late years have historians com- 
menced giving us, in any considerable 
quantity, the truly valuable information. . . . 
Only now, when the welfare of nations 
rather than of rulers is becoming the domi- 
nant idea, are historians beginning to occupy 
themselves with the phenomena of social 
progress. That which it really concerns us 
to know, is the natural history of society. 
We want all facts which help us to under- 
stand how a nation has grown and organized 
itself. 

Among these, let us of course have an 
account of its government : with as little as 
may be of gossip about the men who ofifi- 
cered it, and as much as possible about the 
structure, principles, methods, prejudices, 
corruptions, &c,, which it exhibited. . . . 
Let us of course also have a parallel descrip- 
tion of the ecclesiastical government — its 
organization, its conduct, its power, its rela- 
tions to the State. . . . Let us at the same 
time be informed of the control exercised by 
class over class, as displayed in all social 



70 Educational Nuggets. 

observances — in titles, salutations, and forms 
of address. Let us know, too, what were all 
the other customs which regulated the popu- 
lar life out of doors and in-doors : . . . Next 
should come a delineation of the industrial 
system : . . . Accompanying all which should 
come an account of the industrial arts 
technically considered : stating the processes 
in use, and the quality of the products. 
Further, the intellectual condition of the 
nation in its various grades should be de- 
picted : . . . The degree of esthetic culture 
.... should be described. Nor should 
there be omitted a sketch of the daily lives 
of the people — their food, their homes, and 
their amusements. And lastly, to connect 
the whole, should be exhibited the morals, 
theoretical and practical, of all classes : as 
indicated in their laws, habits, proverbs, 
deeds. 

Such alone is the kind of information re- 
specting past times, which can be of service 
to the citizen for the regulation of his con- 
duct. The only history that is of practical 



Herbert Spencer. 71 

value, is what may be called Descriptive 
Sociology. 

All social phenomena are phenomena of 
life — are the most complex manifestations 
of life — are ultimately dependent on the laws 
of life — and can be understood only when 
the laws of life [biology and psychology] are 
understood. 

The current opinion that science and 
poetry are opposed, is a delusion. It is 
doubtless true that as states of consciousness, 
cognition and emotion tend to exclude each 
other, . . . But it is not true that the facts 
of science are unpoetical ; or that the cultiva- 
tion of science is necessarily unfriendly to 
the exercise of imagination or the love of 
the beautiful. On the contrary, science 
opens up realms of poetry where to the un- 
scientific all is a blank. 

Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a 
sacrilegious belief, that the more a man 
studies Nature the less he reveres it } 
.... The truth is, that those who have 



72 Educational Nuggets. 

never entered upon scientific pursuits know 
not a tithe of the poetry by which they are 
surrounded. Whoever has not in youth 
collected plants and insects, knows not half 
the halo of interest which lanes and hedge- 
rows can assume. Whoever has not sought 
for fossils, has little idea of the poetical 
associations that surround the places where 
imbedded treasures were found. Whoever 
at the seaside has not had a microscope and 
aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest 
pleasures of the seaside are. Sad, indeed, 
is it to see how men occupy themselves with 
trivialities, and are indifferent to the grand- 
est phenomena. 

Thus far our question has been, the worth 
of knowledge of this or that kind for purposes 
of guidance. We have now to judge the 
relative values of different kinds of know- 
ledge for purposes of discipline. ... It 
would be utterly contrary to the beautiful 
economy of Nature if one kind of culture 
were needed for the gaining of information 
and another kind were needed as a 



Herbert Spencer, 73 

mental gymnastic. . . . The education of 
most value for guidance, must at the 
same time be the education of most 
value for discipline. 

While for the training of mere memory, 
science is as good as, if not better than, 
language ; it has an immense superiority 
in the kind of memory it cultivates. In 
the acquirement of a language, the connec- 
tions of ideas to be established in the mind 
correspond to facts that are in great meas- 
ure accidental ; whereas, in the acquirement 
of science, the connections of ideas to be 
established in the mind correspond to facts 
that are mostly necessary. . . . The rela- 
tions which science presents are causal rela- 
tions ; and, when properly taught, are under- 
stood as such. 

Correct judgment, with regard to all 
surrounding things, events, and conse- 
quences, becomes possible only through 
knowledge of the way in which surrounding 
phenomena depend on each other. . . . The 
constant habit of drawing conclusions from 



74 Educaiioftal Nuggets. 

data, and then of verifying those conclusions 
by observation and experiment, can alone 
give the power of judgment correctly. 
And that it necessitates this habit is one of 
the immense advantages of science. 

Not only, however, for intellectual disci- 
pline is science the best ; but also for moral 
discipline. ... By science, constant appeal 
is made to individual reason. Its truths 
are not accepted upon authority alone. . . . 
Every step in a scientific investigation is 
submitted to his judgment. He is not 
asked to admit it without seeing it to be true. 

Nor is this the only benefit bequeathed 
by scientific culture. When carried on, as 
it should always be, as much as possible 
under the form of independent research, 
it exercises perseverance and sincerity. 

Lastly we have to assert .... that the 
discipline of science is superior to that 
of our ordinary education, because of the 
7-i'h'gious culture that it gives. ... It gene- 
rates a profound respect for, and an explicit 



Herbert Spencer. 75 

faith in, those uniform laws which underlie 
all things. By accumulated experiences the 
man of science acquires a thorough belief 
in the unchanging relations of phenomena — 
in the invariable connection of cause and 
consequence — in the necessity of good or 
evil results. ... He sees that the laws to 
which we must submit are not only inexorable 
but beneficent. He sees that in virtue of these 
laws, the process of things is ever towards 
a greater perfection and higher happiness. . . . 
And thus does he, by asserting the eternal 
principles of things and the necessity to 
conforming to them, prove himself intrinsi- 
cally religious. 

To all which add the further religious 
aspect of science, that it alone can give us 
true conceptions of ourselves and our rela- 
tion to the mysteries of existence. At the 
same time that it shows us all which can 
be known, it shows us the limits beyond 
which we can know nothing. . . . Only the 
genuine man of science, we say, can truly 
know how utterly beyond, not only human 



'jd Educational Nuggets. 

knowledge, but human conception, is the 
Universal Power of which Nature, and Life, 
and Thought are manifestations. 

Intellectual Education. 

There can not fail to be a relationship be- 
tween the successive systems of education, 
and the successive social states with which 
they have co-existed. Having a common 
origin in the national mind, the institutions 
of each epoch, whatever be their special 
functions, must have a family likeness. 
When men received their creed and its inter- 
pretations from an infallible authority 
deigning no explanations, it was natural 
that the teaching of children should be 
purely dogmatic. 

The increase of political liberty, the aboli- 
tion of law restricting individual action, and 
the amelioration of the criminal code, have 
been accompanied by a kindred progress 
towards non-coercive education : the pupil 
is hampered by fewer restraints, and other 



Herbert Spencer. yj 

means than punishments are used to govern 
him. 

Some centuries ago there was uniformity' 
of belief — religious, political, and educational, 
.... The decline of authority, whether 
papal, philosophic, kingly, or tutorial, is 
essentially one phenomenon ; in each of its 
aspects a leaning towards free action is 
seen alike in the working out of the change 
itself, and in the new forms of theory and 
practice to which the change has given 
birth. 

Of the three phases through which human 
opinion passes — the unanimity of the igno- 
rant, the disagreement of the inquiring, and 
the unanimity of the wise — it is manifest 
that the second is the parent of the third. 
They are not sequences in time only ; they 
are j^sequences in causation. However im- 
patiently, therefore, we may witness the 
present conflict of educational systems, and 
however much we may regret its accompany- 
ing evils, we must recognize it as a transition 



78 Educational Nuggets. 

stage needful to be passed through, and 
beneficent in its ultimate effects. 

The once universal practice of learning by 
rote, is daily falling more into discredit. . . . 
The rote-system, like other systems of its 
age, made more of the forms and symbols 
than of the things symbolized. To repeat 
the words correctly was everything; to 
understand their meaning, nothing ; and 
thus the spirit was sacrificed to the letter. 

Along with rote-teaching, is declining also 
the nearly allied teaching by rules. . . . 
While rules, lying isolated in the mind — 
not joined to its other contents as out- 
growths from them — are continually forgot- 
ten, the principles which those rules express 
piecemeal, become, when once reached by 
the understanding, enduring possessions. 
While the rule-taught youth is at sea when 
beyond the rules, the youth instructed in 
principles solves a new case as readily as an 
old one. 

In following the process of nature, neither 



Herbert Spencer. 79 

individuals nor nations ever arrive at the 
science first. ... In short, as grammar 
was made after language, so ought it to be 
taught after language ; an inference which 
all who recognize the relationship between 
the evolution of the race and of the individ- 
ual, will see to be unavoidable. 

Of new" practices that have grown up dur- 
ing the decline of the old ones, the most 
important is the systematic culture of the 
powers of observation. After long ages of 
blindness men are at last seeing that the 
spontaneous activity of the observing facul- 
ties in children has a meaning and a use. 
What was once thought [in children] mere 
purposeless action, or play, or mischief, as 
the case might be, is now recognized as the 
process of acquiring a know'ledge on which 
all after-knowledge is based. Hence the 
\vell-conceived but ill-conducted system of 
object-lessons. 

Indeed, if we consider it, we shall find 
that exhaustive observation is an element in 
all great success. It is not to artists, natural- 



8o Educational Nuggets. 

ists, and men of science only, that it is need- 
ful ; it is not only that the skillful physician 
depends on it for the correctness of his 
diagnosis, and that to the good engineer it 
is so important that some years in the work- 
shop are prescribed for him ; but we may 
see that the philosopher also is fundamen- 
tally one who observes relationships of things 
which others had overlooked, and that the 
poet, too, is one who sees the fine facts in 
nature which all recognize when pointed out, 
but did not before remark. 

The truths of number, of form, of rela- 
tionship in position, w'ere all originally 
drawn from objects ; and to present these 
truths to the child in the concrete is to let 
him learn them as the race learnt them. 

But of all the changes taking place, the 
most significant is the growing desire to 
make the acquirement of knowledge pleas- 
ureable rather than painful — a desire based 
on the more or less distinct perception that 
at each age the intellectual action which a 



Herbert Speficer. 8 1 

child likes is a healthful one for it ; and con- 
versely. 

What now is the common characteristic 
of these several changes ? Is it not an in- 
creasing conformity to the methods of 
nature ? . . . . For as it is the order of 
nature in all creatures that the gratification 
accompanying the fulfilment of needful 
functions serves as a stimulus to their fulfil- 
ment — as during the self-education of the 
young child, the delight taken in the biting 
of corals, and the pulling to pieces of toys, 
becomes the prompter to actions which 
teach it the properties of matter ; it follows 
that, in choosing the succession of subjects 
and the modes of instruction which most 
interest the pupil, we are fulfilling nature's 
behests, and adjusting our proceedings to 
the laws of life. 

In education the process of self-develop- 
ment should be encouraged to the fullest 
extent. Children should be led to make 
their own investigations, and to draw their 
own inferences. They should be told as 



82 Educational Nuggets. 

little as possible, and induced to discover as 
much as possible. 

As a final test by which to judge any 
plan of culture, should come the question, — 
Does it create a pleasurable excitement in 
the pupils? When in doubt whether a 
particular mode or arrangement is or is not 
more in harmony with the foregoing princi- 
ples than some other, we may safely abide 
by this criterion. Even when, as considered 
theoretically, the proposed course seems the 
best, yet if it produce no interest, or less 
interest than another course, we should re- 
linquish it ; for a child's intellectual instincts 
are more trustworthy than our reasonings. 

The earliest impressions that the mind can 
assimilate, are those given to it by the un- 
decomposable sensations — resistance, light, 
sound, &c. . . . There can be no idea of 
form until some familiarity with light in its 
gradations and qualities, or resistance in its 
different intensities, has been acquired ; for, 
as has been long known, we recognize vis- 
ible form by means of varieties of light, and 



Herbert Spencer. 83 

tangible form by means of varieties of resis- 
tance. Similarly, no articulate sound is 
cognizable until the inarticulate sounds which 
go to make it up have been learned. 

It needs but a glance at the daily life of 
the infant to see that all the knowledge of 
things which is gained before the acquirement 
of speech, is self-gained — that the qualities 
of hardness and weight associated with cer- 
tain visual appearances, the possession of 
particular forms and colors by particular 
persons, the productions of special sounds 
by animals, the special aspects, are phenom- 
ena which it observes for itself. 

And is not nature perpetually thrusting 
this method upon us, if we had but the wit 
to see it, and the humility to adopt it } What 
can be more manifest than the desire of chil- 
dren for intellectual sympathy ? Mark how 
the infant sitting on your knee thrusts into 
your face the toy it holds, that you, too, may 
look at it. See when it makes a creak with 
its wet finger on the table, how it turns and 
looks at you ; does it again, and again looks 



84 Educational Nuggets. 

at you ; thus saying as clearly as it can — 
" Hear this new sound." 

Is it not clear that we must conform our 
course to these intellectual instincts — that we 
must just systematize the natural process — 
that we must listen to all the child has to tell 
us about each object, must induce it to say 
everything it can think of about such object, 
must occasionally draw its attention to facts 
it has not yet observed, with the view of 
leading it to notice them itself whenever they 
recur, and must go on by and by to indicate 
or supply new series of things for a like ex- 
haustive examination ? 

To tell the child this and to show it the 
other, is not to teach it how to observe, but 
to make it a mere recipient of another's ob- 
servations : a proceeding which weakens 
rather than strengthens its powers of self- 
instruction — which deprives it of the plea- 
sures resulting from successful activity — 
which presents this all-attractive knowledge 
under the aspect of formal tuition— and which 
thus generates that indifference and even 



Herbert Spencer. 85 

disgust with whicli these object-lessons are 
not unfrequently regarded. 

Object-lessons should .... be extended 
to a range of things far wider, and continue 
to a period far later, than now. They should 
not be limited to the contents of the house ; 
but should include those of the fields and the 
hedges, the quarry and the sea-shore. They 
should not cease with early childhood ; but 
should be so kept up during youth as insen- 
sibly to merge into the investigations of the 
naturalist and the man of science. 

If men are to be mere cits, mere porers 
over ledgers, with no ideas beyond their 
trades — if it is well that they should be as 
the cockney whose conception of rural plea- 
sures extends no further than sitting in a tea- 
garden smoking pipes and drinking porter; 
or as the squire who thinks of woods as 
places for shooting in, of uncultivated plants 
as nothing but weeds, and who classifies an- 
imals into game, vermin, and stock — then in- 
deed it is needless for men to learn anything 
that does not directly help to replenish the 



86 Educatio7ial Nuggets. 

till and fill the larder. But if there is a 
more worthy aim for us than to be drudges 
— if there are other uses in the things around 
us than their power to bring money —if there 
are higher faculties to be exercised than ac- 
quisitive and sensual ones — if the pleasures 
which poetry and art and science and phil- 
osophy can bring are of any moment — then 
is it desirable that the instinctive inclination 
which every child shows to observe natural 
beauties and investigate natural phenomena 
should be encouraged. 

The spreading recognition of drawing as 
an element of education, is one amongst 
many signs of the more rational views on 
mental culture now beginning to prevail. 

What is it that the child first tries to rep- 
resent ? Things that are large, things that 
are attractive in color, things round which 
its pleasurable associations most cluster — 
human beings from whom it has received so 
many emotions, cows and dogs which inter- 
est by the many phenomena they present, 
houses that are hourly visible and strike by 



Herbert Spencer. 87 

their size and contrast of parts. And whicli 
of all the processes of representation gives 
it most delight ? Coloring. Paper and pen- 
cil are good in default of something better ; 
but a box of paints and a brush — these are 
the treasures. 

Now, ridiculous as such a position will 
"seem to drawing-masters, who postpone 
coloring and who teach form by a dreary 
discipline of copying lines, we believe that 
the course of culture thus indicated is the 
right one. That priority of color to form, 
which, as already pointed out, has a psycho- 
logical basis, and in virtue of which psy- 
chological basis arises this strong preference 
in the child, should be recognized from the 
very beginning ; and from the very beginning 
also the things imitated should be real. 

From all that has been said, it may be 
readily inferred that we wholly disapprove of 
the practice of drawing from copies ; and 
still more so of that formal discipline in mak- 
ing straight lines and curved lines and com- 



Educational Nuggets. 



pound lines, with wliich it is the fashion of 
some teachers to begin. 

Almost invariably, children show a strong 
propensity to cut out things in paper, to 
make, to build — a propensity which, if duly 
encouraged and directed, will not only pre- 
pare the way for scientific conceptions, but 
will develop those powers of manipulation 
in which most people are so deficient. 

When the observing and inventive facul- 
ties have attained the requisite power, the 
pupil may be introduced to empirical ge- 
ometry ; that is — geometry dealing with 
methodical solutions, but not with the dem- 
onstrations of them. Like all other tran- 
sitions in education, this should be made 
not formally but incidentally; and the re- 
lationship to constructive art should still be 
maintained. 

The foregoing outlines of plans for ex- 
ercising the perceptions in early childhood, 
for conducting object-lessons, for teaching 
drawing and geometry, must be considered 



Herbert Spencer. 



as roughly-sketched illustrations of the 
method dictated by the general principles 
previously specified. We believe that on 
examination they will be found not only to 
progress from the simple to the complex, 
from the concrete to the abstract, from the 
empirical to the rational ; but to satisfy the 
further requirements that education shall be 
a repetition of civilization in little, that it 
shall be as much as possible a process of 
self-evolution, and that it shall be pleasura- 
ble. 

Any piece of knowledge which the pupil 
has himself acquired, any problem which he 
has himself solved, becomes by virtue of the 
conquest much more thoroughly his than it 
could else be. The preliminary activity of 
mind which his success implies, the concen- 
tration of thought necessary to it, and the 
excitement consequent on his triumph, con- 
spire to register all the facts in his memory 
in a way that no mere information heard 
from a teacher, or read in a school-book, 
can be registered. 



go Educational Nuggets. 

Courage in attacking difficulties, patient 
concentration of the attention, perseverance 
through failures — these are characteristics 
which after-life specially requires ; and these 
are characteristics which this system of 
making the mind work for its food specially 
produces. 

As suggesting a final reason for making 
education a process of self-instruction, and 
consequence a process of pleasurable in- 
struction, we may advert to the fact that, in 
proportion as it is made so, is there a prob- 
ability that education will not cease when 
school days end. . . . When the acqui- 
sition of knowledge has been rendered 
habitually gratifying, then will there be as 
prevailing a tendency to continue, without 
superintendence, that same self-culture pre- 
viously carried on under superintendence. 
These results are inevitable. 

Moral Education, 
The great error made by those who dis- 
cuss questions of juvenile discipline, is in 
ascribing all the faults and difficulties to the 



Herbert Spencer. 91 

children, and none to the parents. The 
current assumption respecting family gov- 
ernment, as respecting national government, 
is, that the virtues are v;^ith the rulers and 
the vices vi^ith the ruled. 

The truth is, that the difficulties of moral 
education are necessarily of dual origin — 
necessarily result from the combined faults 
of parents and children. 

When a child falls, or runs its head 
against the table, it suffers a pain, the re- 
membrance of which tends to make it more 
careful for the future ; and by an occasional 
repetition of like experiences, it is eventually 
disciplined into a proper guidance of its 
movements. ... In these and like cases. 
Nature illustrates to us in the simplest way, 
the true theory and practice of moral dis- 
cipline. 

It is the peculiarity of these penalties, if 
we must so call them, [of physical trans- 
gression] that they are nothing more than 
the unavoidable consequences of the deeds 



92 Educational Nuggets. 

which they follow : they are nothing more 
than the inevitable reactions entailed by the 
child's actions. 

These painful reactions are proportionate 
to the degree in which the organic laws 
have been transgressed. A slight accident 
brings a slight pain, a more serious one, a 
greater pain. 

These natural reactions which follow the 
child's wrong actions, are constant, direct, 
unhesitating, and not to be escaped. No 
threats ; but a silent, rigorous performance. 
If a child runs a pin into its finger, pain fol- 
lows. If it does it again, there is again the 
same result : and so on perpetually. In all 
its dealings with surrounding inorganic na- 
ture it finds this unswerving persistence, 
which listens to no excuse, and from which 
there is no appeal ; and very soon recogniz- 
ing this stern though beneficent discipline, it 
becomes extremely careful not to transgress. 

Still more significant will these general 
truths appear, when we remember that they 



Herbert Spencer. 93 

hold throughout adult life as well as 
throughout infantine life. It is by an exper- 
imentally-gained knowledge of the natural 
consequences, that men and women are 
checked when they go wrong. 

Have we not here, then, the guiding prin- 
ciple of moral education } . . , . Is it not 
manifest that as " ministers and interpreters 
of Nature " it is the function of parents to 
see that their children habitually experience 
the true consequences of their conduct — the 
natural reactions : neither warding them off, 
nor intensifying them, nor putting artificial 
consequences in place of them ? No un- 
prejudiced reader will hesitate in his assent. 

The truly instructive and salutary conse- 
quences are not those inflicted by parents 
when they take upon themselves to be 
Nature's proxies ; but they are those in- 
flicted by Nature herself. 

In every family where there are young 
children there almost daily occur cases of 
what mothers and servants call " making a 



94 Educational Nuggets. 

litter." .... In most cases the trouble of 
rectifying this disorder falls anywhere but 
in the right place : . . . .In this very simple 
case, however, there are many parents wise 
enough to follow out, more or less consis- 
tently, the normal course — that of making 
the child itself collect the toys or shreds. 
The labor of putting things in order is the 
true consequence of having put them in 
disorder. 

If the natural penalty be met by any re- 
fractory behavior (which it may perhaps be 
where the general system of moral disci- 
pline previously pursued has been bad), then 
the proper course is to let the child feel the 
ulterior reaction consequent on its disobedi- 
ence. Having refused or neglected to pick 
up and put away the things it has scattered 
about, and having thereby entailed the 
trouble of doing this on some one else, the 
child should, on subsequent occasions, be 
denied the means of giving this trouble. 

Right conceptions of cause and effect are 
early formed ; and by frequent and consis- 



Herbert Spencer. 95 

tent experience are eventually rendered defi- 
nite and complete. Proper conduct in life 
is much better guaranteed when the good 
and evil consequences of action are ration- 
ally understood, than when they are merely 
believed on authority. 

Another great advantage of this natural 
system of discipline is, that it is a system of 
pure justice ; and will be recognized by every 
child as such. Whoso suffers nothing more 
than the evil which obviously follows natu- 
rally from his own misbeha-vior, is much less 
likely to think himself wrongly treated than 
if he suffers an evil artificially inflicted on 
him ; and this will be true of children as of 



How is this method to be applied to the 
graver offences } . . . , Note, in the first 
place, that these graver offences are likely to 
be both less frequent and less grave under 
the rigime we have described than under 
the ordinary regime. . . . When, however, 
such offences are committed, as they will 
occasionally be even under the best system, 



g6 Edticatiojial Nuggets, 

the discipline of consequences may still be 
resorted to ; and if there exist that bond of 
confidence and affection which we have de- 
scribed, this discipline will be found efficient. 
.... Where there exists a warm filial affec- 
tion produced by a consistent parental friend- 
ship. . . . there the state of mind caused by 
parental displeasure will not only be salu- 
tary as a check to future misconduct of like 
kind, but will also be intrinsically salutary. 
The moral pain consequent upon having, 
for the time being, lost so loved a friend, 
.will stand in place of the physical pain 
usually inflicted ; and where this attach- 
ment exists, will prove equally, if not more, 
efficient. 

In brief, the truth is that savageness be- 
gets savageness, and gentleness begets gen- 
tleness. Children who are unsympathetically 
treated become relatively unsympathetic ; 
whereas treating them with due fellow-feel- 
ing is a means of cultivating their fellow- 
feeling. 

Do not expect from a child any great 



Herbert SpeJicer. 97 

amount of moral goodness. During early- 
years every civilized man passes through 
that phase of character exhibited by the bar- 
barous race from which he is descended. . . . 
The popular idea that children are " in- 
nocent," while it may be true in so far 
as it refers to evil knowledge, is totally false 
in so far as it refers to evil impulses, as half 
an hour's observation in the nursery will 
prove to any one. 

Not only is it unwise to set up a high 
standard for juvenile good conduct, but it is 
even unwise to use very urgent incitements 
to such good conduct. ... Be content, 
therefore, with moderate measures and 
moderate results. Constantly bear in mind 
the fact that a higher morality, like a higher 
intelligence, must be reached by a slow 
growth; and you will then have more 
patience with those imperfections of nature 
which your child hourly displays. 

Beware, however, of the two extremes ; 
not only in the respect of the intensity, but 



Educational Nuggets. 



in respect of the duration of your displeasure. 
On the one hand, anxiously avoid that weak 
impulsiveness, so general among mothers, 
which scolds and forgives almost in the same 
breath. On the other hand, do not unduly 
continue to show estrangement of feeling, 
lest you accustom your child to do without 
your friendship, and so lose your influence 
over him. 

Be sparing of commands. Command only 
in those cases in which other means are 
inapplicable, or have failed. . . . But when- 
ever you do command, command with de- 
cision and consistency. 

/ Bear constantly in mind the truth that the 
iaim of your discipline should be to produce 
a self-gover7ii}ig being : not to produce a 
being to he. gover7ied by others. 

You will have to carry on your higher 
education at the same time that you are 
educating your children. Intellectually you 
must cultivate to good purpose that most 
complex of subjects — human nature and its 



Herbert Spencer. 99 

laws, as exhibited in your children, in your- 
self, and in the world. Morally, you must 
keep in constant exercise your higher feel- 
ings, and restrain your lower. 

It will be seen that we have said nothing 
in this chapter about the transcendental dis- 
tinction between right and wrong, of which 
wise men know so little, and children no- 
thing. All thinkers are agreed that we may 
find the criterion of right in the effect of ac- 
tions, if we do not find the rule there : and 
that is sufficient for the purpose we have had 



Physical Education. 
On old and young, the pressure of modern 
life puts a still-increasing strain. In all busi- 
nesses and professions, intenser competition 
taxes the energies and abilities of every 
adult ; and, with the view of better fitting 
the young to hold their place under this in- 
tenser competition, they are subject to a 
more severe discipline than heretofore. 

That disastrous consequences must result 



loo Educatio7ial Nuggets. 

from this cumulative transgression might be 
predicted with certainty ; and that they do 
result, every observant person knows. Go 
where you will, and before long there come 
under your notice cases of children, or 
youths, of either sex, more or less injured by 
undue study. 

Nature is a strict accountant ; and if you 
demand of her in one direction more than 
she is prepared to lay out, she balances the 
account by making a deduction elsewhere. 

Let it never be forgotten that the amount 
of vital energy which the body at any mo- 
ment possesses is limited ,: and that, being 
limited, it is impossible to get from it more 
than a fixed quantity of results. 

In a child or youth the demands upon this 
vital energy are various and urgent. As be- 
fore pointed out, the waste consequent on 
the day's bodily exercise has to be repaired ; 
the wear of brain entailed by the day's study 
has to be made good ; a certain additional 
growth of body has to be provided for ; and 



Herbert Spencer. loi 

also a certain additional growth of brain ; 
add to which the amount of energy absorbed 
in the digestion of the large quantity of food 
required for meeting these many demands. 

Hence, if in youth, the expenditure in men- 
tal labor exceeds that which nature has pro- 
vided for ; the expenditure for other purposes 
falls below what it should have been : and 
evils of one kind or other are inevitably en- 
tailed. 

There is an antagonism between growth 
and development. By growth, as used in 
this antithetical sense, is to be understood 
increase of size ; by development, increase 
of structure. And the law is, that great 
activity in either of these processes involves 
retardation or arrest in the other. 

This law is true not only of the organism 
as a whole, but of each separate part. The 
abnormally rapid advance of any part in re- 
spect of structure involves premature arrest 
of its growth ; and this happens with the or- 
gan of the mind as certainly as with any 



I02 Educational Nuggets. 

other organ. The brain, which during early 
years is relatively large in mass but imper- 
fect in structure, will, if required to perform 
its functions with undue activity, undergo a 
structural advance greater than is appropri- 
ate to the age ; but the ultimate effect will 
be a falling short of the size and power that 
would else have been attained. 

But these results of over-education, disas- 
trous as they are, are perhaps less disastrous 
than the results produced upon the health — 
the undermined constitution, the enfeebled 
energies, the morbid feelings. 

Consider, then, how great must be the 
damage inflicted by undue mental excitement 
on children and youths. More or less of 
this constitutional disturbance will inevitably 
follow an exertion of brain beyond that which 
nature has provided for ; and when not so 
excessive as to produce absolute illness, is 
sure to entail a slowly accumulating de- 
generacy oi physique. 

It [the cramming system] is a terrible mis- 



Herbert Spencer. 103 

take, from whatever point of view regarded. 
It is a mistake in so far as the mere acquire- 
ment of knowledge is concerned ; for it is 
notorious that the mind, Hke the body, can- 
not assimilate beyond a certain rate. . . . 
It is a mistake, too, because it tends to make 
study distasteful. ... It is a mistake, also, 
inasmuch as it assumes that the acquisition 
of knowledge is everything ; and forgets that 
a much more important matter is the organi- 
zation of knowledge, for which time and 
spontaneous thinking are requisite. ... It 
is not the knowledge stored up as intellec- 
tual fat which is of value ; but that which is 
turned into intellectual muscle. 

But the mistake is still deeper. Even 
were the system good as a system of intel- 
lectual training, which it is not, it would 
still be bad, because, as we have shown, it is 
fatal to that vigor of physique which is need- 
ful to make intellectual training available in 
the struggle of life. 

Perhaps nothing will so much hasten the 
time when body and mind will both be ade- 



I04 Educatio7ial Nuggets, 

quately cared for, as a diffusion of the belief 
that the preservation of health is a duty. 
Few seem conscious that there is such a 
thing as physical morality. 

The fact is, that all breaches of the laws of 
health 2iX& physical sins. When this is gen- 
erally seen, then, and perhaps not till then, 
will the physical training of the young receive 
all the attention it deserves. 



WILLIAM T. HARRIS. 

From " Psychologic Foundations of 
Education." ^ 

Introduction. 
Some knowledge of the mind every success- 
ful teacher must have, although in so many 
cases it is unsystematic, and consequently 
unscientific. . . . Science compensates the 
inequability of individual experience by re- 
inforcing it with the aggregate of all other 
experiences. 

In rational psychology we learn that there 
are three stages of the development of the 
thinking power. The first stage is that of 
sense-perception ; its form of thinking con- 
ceives all objects as having independent being 
and as existing apart from all relation to 
other objects. . . . 



1 A volume in The International Education Series 
This volume is written, and the series is edited, by Wm. 
T. Harris, A.M., LL. D. United States Commissioner 
of Education. New York ; D. Appleton & Co., 1898. 



io6 Educational Nuggets. 

The second stage of knowing is that which 
sees everything as depending upon the en- 
vironment. Everything is relative, and can 
not exist apart from its relation to other 
things. . . . 

The third stage of thinking arrives at the 
insight that true being is self-active or self- 
determined. True being is therefore self- 
conscious being, and exists as intellect and 
will ; all else is phenomenal being — On this 
insight depend the doctrines of God, freedom, 
and immutability. . . . 

The most important end of intellectual 
education is to take the pupil safely through 
the world theory of the first and second 
stages— namely, sense-perception and the 
relativity doctrine — up to the insight into the 
personal nature of the absolute. All parts 
and pieces of school education should have 
in mind this development of the intellect. 

The most important discovery ever made 
in psychology is this one of the three ascend- 
ing steps or grades of thought which any 
one may take with due study and meditation. 
It is attributed to Plato. 



Williain T. Harris. 107 

The Psychology of Infancy. 

For the first four years of the child's life the 
family education has been all in all for 
him. . . . 

Imitation precedes the acquisition of lan- 
guage. In his third and fourth years the 
child's knowledge of the external world has 
progressed steadily, powerfuly aided, as it is 
now, by the acquisition of language ; for by 
language the child has become able to use 
the senses of other people as well as his own. 

The place of imitation in the development 
of civilized man is beginning to be recog- 
nized. . . . The study of imitation leads 
to the discovery of the modes by which the 
individual man repeats for himself the think- 
ing and doing and feeling of his fellows, and 
thus enriches his own life by adding to it 
the lives of others. 

To see the significance of imitation in the 
child-mind, we must look upon it not as 
comparatively feeble and mechanical effort, 
as something determined by outside in- 



io8 Ediicatio7ial Nuggets, 

fluences, but as a phase of self-activity which 
is engaged in emancipating the self from 
heredity and natural impulse. 

There is an element of originality in the 
most mechanical phase of imitation. The 
self is active and assimilative. It sees an 
external deed which it proceeds to make its 
own deed by imitation. 

In the acquirement of language the child 
has come into possession of the most power- 
ful instrument of self-education that exists, 
and he has acquired a new faculty of mind — 
the faculty of seeing each object before the 
senses in the light of its universal — that is to 
say, he sees the real with a margin of ideal 
possibilities all around it. Ever after he 
will see any example or specimen that comes 
under a class name with a reflection that 
the previous specimen differed from it in 
some respects of size or color or shape. 
He will think of the other possibilities not 
realized whenever he sees any given real 
specimen of a class. Here, therefore, begins 
the child's perception of ideals. 



William T, Harris. 109 

The period of infancy is dominated by 
what may be called the symbolic stage of 
mind. . . . 

There must be distinguished the follow- 
ing stages of symbolism : 

{a) Personification : the placing of a 
soul in a thing : animism. 

ip) Metaphor : the elevation of thing to 
a spiritual meaning (thing to soul, as per- 
sonification makes soul to thing.) 

{c) Play : one thing substituted for 
another : " Make believe that this stick is a 
horse ; " "I have built a house with these 
blocks ; " " This is the way the farmer 
mows his grass." 

{d) The unconscious symbolic in poetry 
and mythology. It uses typical characters, 
shrouding the human in the forms of ani- 
mals in fairy stories and fables. 

The step from the image o.f a material 
object by symbolism to a spiritual relation 
shows a progress. . . . But the more famil- 
iar this step becomes the less time is occu- 
pied in imaging the material object, and the 



I lo Educatiotial Nuggets. 

accent is placed more sharply on the 
thought of the spiritual object. By and by 
the image of the material object drops away 
almost entirely, and the word becomes a 
conventional sign for the spiritual thought 
and the mind forgets the sensuous meaning. 
This is the passage from the symbolic to 
the conventional stage of the mind, and 
takes place at a well-defined epoch in the 
life of the child in modern civilization. In 
savage life it is never reached. The mind 
remains at the myth-making or symbolic 
stage. 

When the child possesses language and 
begins to inquire for names, begins to see 
ideals and to act to realize them, he can be 
helped greatly by the kindergarten method 
of instruction. . . . The kindergarten wisely 
selects a series of objects that lead to the 
useful possession of certain geometric con- 
cepts and numerical concepts that assist in 
grasping all things in their inorganic aspects. 
.... The kindergarten, in using the gifts 
and occupations, however, does not use the 



William T. Ham's. in 

highest and best that Froebel has invented. 
The peculiar Froebel device is found in the 
plays and games. 

The kindergarten does well when it 
teaches the gifts and occupations, for it 
deals with the world of means and instru- 
mentalities, and helps the child to the con- 
quest of Nature. It does better with the 
plays and games, because these are 
thoroughly humane in their nature, and 
they offer to the child in a symbolic form a 
first version of the experience of the race in 
solving the problem of life. 

After the symbolic comes what is called 
the conventional. . . . The child, in fact, has 
arrived at a point where he needs instru- 
ments of self-help ; he needs to master the 
conventionalities of human learning ; he 
needs to learn how to read and write, and 
how to record the results of arithmetic. . . . 

This must be done by individual industry, 
and is an ethical deed quite distinct from 
the work of the child in the kindergarten. 
The child now feels the impulse of duty. 



1 1 2 Educational Nuggets. 

Self-subordination to reasonable tasks is no 
longer play. He has arrived at the transi- 
tion from play to work. 

Psychology of the Course of Study in 
Schools. 

There are five windows of the soul, 
which open out upon five great divisions of 
the life of man. . . . 

The studies of the school fall naturally 
into these five co-ordinate groups; first, 
mathematics and physics ; second, biology, 
including chiefly the plant and the animal ; 
third, literature and art, including chiefly the 
study of literary works of art ; fourth, gram- 
mar and the technical and scientific study of 
language, leading to such branches as logic 
and psychology ; fifth, history and the study 
of sociological, political, and social institu- 
tions. Each one of these groups should be 
represented in the curriculum of the schools 
at all times by some topic suited to the age 
and previous training of the pupil. 

The elementary course of study is adapted 



Williain T. Ham's. 113 

to the first eight years of school life, say 
from the age of six to that of fourteen years. 
That course of study deals chiefly with 
giving the child a mastery over the symbols 
of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the 
technical words in which are expressed the 
distinctions of arithmetic, geography, gram- 
mar, and history. The child has not yet 
acquired much knowledge of human nature, 
nor of the world of things and forces about 
him. He has a tolerably quick grasp of 
isolated things and events, but he has very 
small power of synthesis. He cannot com- 
bine in his little mind things and events so 
as to perceive whole processes. It is the 
business of the school to induct him by easy 
steps into these things. 

It is a necessary characteristic of primary or 
elementary instruction that it must take the 
world of human learnings in fragments, and 
fail to give its pupil an insight into the 
interrelation of things. It is the constant 
effort of good teaching to correct this 
defect. 



1 14 Educational Nuggets. 

There is a great difference between tfie 
teacher who requires only isolated details of 
his pupils and the one who directs their at- 
tention toward the relations and interdepen- 
dences from the beginning. The true teach- 
ing aims always to strengthen the power of 
seizing relations. It cultivates the power of 
thought. 

The education of high schools, academies, 
and preparatory schools — what we call 
secondary schools — begins to correct this 
inadequacy of elementary education. It 
begins to see things and events as parts of 
processes, and to understand their signifi- 
cance by tracing them back to their causes 
and forward to their results. . . . Where 
the pupil in the elementary school studies 
arithmetic and solves problems in particular 
numbers, the secondary pupil studies alge- 
bra and solves problems in general terms. 
Each algebraic formula is a rule for the 
performance of an indefinite number of 
arithmetical examples. In geometry, the 
secondary pupil learns necessary relations 



Willi a7n T, Harris. 115 

of spatial forms. In general history, he 
studies the collisions of one nation with 
another, and learns to interpret all the events 
in the light of the principle involved in the 
struggle. In science, he learns the forms 
and relations of Nature's phenomena. In 
the study of foreign languages he notes the 
variation of words to indicate relations of 
syntax ; he investigates the structure of lan- 
guage, in which is revealed the degree of 
consciousness of the people who made that 
language. 

But secondary education does not connect 
in any adequate manner the intellect and 
the will. It does not convert intellectual 
perceptions into rules of action. This is left 
for higher education. 

The youth of proper age to enter on higher 
education has already experienced much of 
human life, and has arrived at the point 
where he begins to feel the necessity for a 
regulative principle, or a principle that shall 
guide him in deciding the endless questions 
which press upon him for settlement. Tak- 



Ii6 Educational Nuggets. 

ing the youth at this epoch, when he begins 
to inquire for a principle, the college gives 
him a compend of human experience. 

The person who has had merely an ele- 
mentary schooling has laid stress on the 
mechanical means of culture — on the arts of 
reading, writing, computing, and the like. 
He has trained his mind for the acquirement 
of isolated details. . . , He has not yet 
learned the difference between knowledge 
and wisdom, or, what is better, the method 
of converting knowledge into wisdom. 

It is evident that the individual who has 
received only an elementary education is at 
great disadvantage as compared with the 
person who has received a higher education 
in the college or university, making all 
allowances for the imperfections of existing 
institutions. 

Very few persons change their methods 
after they leave school. Hence the impor- 
tance of reaching the influence of the 
method of higher education before one closes 
his school career. 



Willi am T. Haj-ris. 117 

All the influences of the university, its 
distinguished professors, its venerable repu- 
tation, the organization of the students and 
professors as an institutional whole, com- 
bined with the isolation of the student from 
the strong ties of the home and the home 
community — all these taken together are 
able to effect this change in method when 
brought to bear upon a youth for four years. 
He acquires an attitude of mind which may 
be best described as critical and compara- 
tive. 

From " How Far May the State Pro- 
vide Education at Public Cost ? " 
In all countries the military education is 
at public expense. Where does the support 
and education of the nobility and royal 
families come from, except from the public ? 
.... But in our country, where each is 
born to all the rights of mankind without 
distinction, all must be provided for. 

It is, indeed, a great thing to have one 
class of society educated. No doubt, all 
profit by it, even when the education is con- 



1 1 8 Edttcatzojial Nuggets. 

fined to a few. But in a democracy all must 
be educated, the interest of property demands 
it, the interest of the government demands it. 

The statistics of penitentiaries show that 
a very small per cent, of well-educated men 
are incarcerated. The public schools send 
very few. . . . Self-directed intelligence 
makes for itself avenues for employment. 
Nothing is lost. Directive power finds it 
easier to secure a competence by industry 
than by intrigue and rascality. 

The discipline of our Public Schools 
wherein punctuality and regularity are en- 
forced and the pupils are continually taught 
to suppress mere self-will and inclination, 
is the best school for morality. 

Address on Horace Mann. 
In studying the records of Massachusetts, 
one is impressed by the fact that every new 
movement in education has run the gauntlet 
of fierce and bitter opposition before adop- 
tion. The ability of the conservative party 
has always been conspicuous, and the friends 



William T. Harris. 119 

of ihe new measure have been forced to ex- 
ert all their strength, and to eliminate one 
after another the objectionable features dis- 
covered in advance by their enemies. To 
this fact is due the success of so many of the 
reforms and improvements that have pro- 
ceeded from this State. 

We are apt to become impatient and 
blame too severely the conservative party in 
Massachusetts. 

We forget that the opposition helped to 
perfect the theory of the reform, and did 
much to make it a real advance instead of a 
mere change from one imperfect method to 
another. Even at best, educational changes 
are often only changes of fashion — the swing 
of the pendulum from one extreme to an- 
other — and sure to need correction by a 
fresh reaction. 

Take as an instance of this the use of 
text-books. Every one will admit that what 
is called the " slavish use " of such means is 
a great evil. The memorizing of words and 
sentences, without criticism and reflection on 



Educational Nuggets. 



their meaning, is a mechanical training of 
the mind and fit only for parrots. But, on 
the other hand, the proper use of the printed 
page is the greatest of all arts taught in the 
school. . . . For real progress comes from 
availing one's self of the wisdom of the race 
and using it as an instrument of new dis- 
covery. 

That other method sometimes com- 
mended, of original investigation without 
aid from books, forgets that mankind has 
toiled for long thousands of years to con- 
struct a ladder of achievement and that 
civilization is on the highest round of this 
ladder. It has invented school education 
in order that its youth may climb quickly to 
the top on the rounds which have been 
added one by one, slowly, in the lapse of 
ages. 

From "The Philosophy of Education." 

Problems Peculiar to America?! Education?- 

There are two kinds of education. The 



1 Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical 
and Political Science. 189^. 



William T. Harris. 121 

first may be called Substantial Education — 
the education by means of the memory ; the 
education which gives to the individual, 
methods and habits and the fundamentals 
of knowledge. . . . This is education by au- 
thority. 

The second kind may be called individual 
or scientific education ; it is the education of 
insight as opposed to that of authority. 

There is this danger in the S3^stem of edu- 
cation by insight, if begun too early, that 
the individual tends to become so self-con- 
ceited with what he considers knowledge 
gotten by his own personal thought and re- 
search, that he drifts towards empty agnos- 
ticism with the casting overboard of all 
authority. It is, therefore, necessary that 
this excessive conceit of self which this 
modern scientific method of education fos- 
ters, be lessened by building on the safe 
foundations of what has been described as 
the education of authority. 

There is another problem — that of the 



Educational Ntiggets. 



their meaning, is a mechanical training of 
the mind aixl fit only for parrots. But, on 
the other hand, the proper use of the printed 
page is the greatest of all arts taught in the 
school. . . . For real progress comes from 
availing one's self of the wisdom of the race 
and using it as an instrument of new dis- 
covery. 

That other method sometimes com- 
mended, of original investigation without 
aid from books, forgets that mankind has 
toiled for long thousands of years to con- 
struct a ladder of achievement and that 
civilization is on the highest round of this 
ladder. It has invented school education 
in order that its youth may climb quickly to 
the top on the rounds which have been 
added one by one, slowly, in the lapse of 
ages. 

From "The Philosophy of Education." 

Problems Peculiar to American Education}- 

There are two kinds of education. The 



1 Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical 
and Political Science. 1893. 



WiUiain T. Harris. 121 

first may be called Substantial Education — 
the education by means of the memory ; the 
education which gives to the individual, 
methods and habits and the fundamentals 
of knowledge. . . . This is education by au- 
thority. 

The second kind may be called individual 
or scientific education ; it is the education of 
insight as opposed to that of authority. 

There is this danger in the s^^stem of edu- 
cation by insight, if begun too early, that 
the individual tends to become so self-con- 
ceited with what he considers knowledge 
gotten by his own personal thought and re- 
search, that he drifts towards empty agnos- 
ticism with the casting overboard of all 
authority. It is, therefore, necessary that 
this excessive conceit of self which this 
modern scientific method of education fos- 
ters, be lessened by building on the safe 
foundations of what has been described as 
the education of authority. 

There is another problem — that of the 



1 24 Educational Nuggets. 

knowledge : we explain it in terms of the 
old ; we classify it ; identify it ; reconcile 
what is strange and unfamiliar in it with 
previous experience : we interpret the object 
and comprehend it ; we translate the un- 
known into the known. 

This process of adjusting, explaining, 
classifying, identifying, reconciling, interpret- 
ing and translating is called apperception. 
We must not only perceive, but we must 
apperceive ; not only see and hear, but di- 
gest and assimilate what we hear and see. 

Herbart's " apperception " is far more 
important for education than Pestalozzi's 
" perception ". . . . The course of study in 
schools must be arranged so as to prepare 
the mind for quick apperception of what is 
studied. 

Herbert Spencer, and " What Knowledge 
Is of Most Worth." 

Spencer calls education the subject which 
involves all other subjects, and the one in 



William T. Harris, 125 

which they should all culminate. But some 
one has better said that school education is 
the giving to man the possession of the 
instrumentalities of intelligence. By his 
school education he does not attain all edu- 
cation, but he gets the tools of thought by 
which to master the wisdom of the race. 

The first or elementary education is but 
superficial, a mere inventory : the secondary 
insists on some reflection on what has been 
learned ; and the third, or higher education, 
is the unity and comparison of all that has 
been learned, so that each is explained by 
the whole. Give the child the embryology 
of civilization, and his insight into the evo- 
lution of civilization is insured. 

From " Report : Commissioner of 
Education." — 1897. 

While the education of the American 
people supported by taxes and public funds 
is becoming more and more rigidly secular 
in character and the lines drawn more 
closely which separate it from ecclesiastical 



1 26 Educational Nuggets, 

and religious instruction, yet the true im- 
portance of religious instruction is coming 
to be better understood among scientific 
and philosophical thinkers. 

The secular institutions of man are organ- 
ized as the family, civil society and the state. 
These provide for education, the procure- 
ment of the necessities of life, and the 
establishment of justice. But all of these 
presuppose a deeper ground in the ideal of 
the origin and destiny of man and nature. 
They involve a world view, and religion fur- 
nishes and must furnish a world view. 
Hence all people, whether connected with 
one or another denomination of Christians, 
or whether holding a religion other than 
Christian or holding no conscious religion at 
all, must admit the importance of the reli- 
gious instruction of the community. 

The secular school gives positive instruc- 
tion. It teaches mathematics, natural sci- 
ence, history and language. Knowledge of 
the facts can be precise and accurate, and a 
similar knowledge of the principles can be 



William T. Harris. 127 

arrived at. The self-activity of the pupil is 
before all things demanded by the teacher 
of the secular school. The pupil must not 
take things on authority, but must test and 
verify what he has been told by his own ac- 
tivity. 

On the other hand religion, which gives 
the net result of the wisdom of the race in 
the form of authority, omits and must omit 
the long lines of proof which have established 
it. 

Religious education, it is obvious, in giv- 
ing the highest results of thought and life to 
the young, must cling to the form of author- 
ity, and not attempt to borrow the methods 
of mathematics, science, and history from 
the secular school. Such borrowing will 
result only in giving the young people an 
overweening confidence in the finality of 
their own immature judgments. They will 
become conceited and shallow-minded. 

Against this danger of sapping or under- 
mining all authority in religion by the intro- 



1 28 Editcational Nuggets. 

duction of the methods of the secular school 
which lay all stress on the self-activity of the 
child, the Sunday school has not been suffi- 
ciently protected in the more recent years of 
its history. Large numbers of religious 
teachers, most intelligent and zealous in their 
piety, seek a more and more perfect adoption 
of the secular school methods. . . . That 
method is not adapted to teach mystic truth. 
It seeks everywhere definite and especially 
mathematical results. But these results, 
although they are found everywhere in science 
and mathematics, are the farthest possible 
from being like the subject-matter of religon. 

At present more and more attention is 
being given in the schools of civilized peoples 
to the training of pupils in esthetic taste. 
Those nations, other things being equal, are 
the richest that give their goods a beautiful 
finish and that introduce tasteful ornamen- 
tation. This accounts largely for the first 
rank held by France and Great Britain in 
the markets of the world. 

The next step after the development of 



Williain T. Har7'is. I2g 

the personal work of art in the shape of 
beautiful youth, by means of the national 
games and the cultivation of the taste of the 
entire people through the spectacle of these 
games, was the art of sculpture, by which 
these forms of beauty, realized in the athletes 
and existing in the minds of the people as 
ideals of correct taste, were fixed in stone 
and set up in the temples for worship. Thus 
Greek art was born= 

It is not their resemblance to living bodies, 
not their anatomical exactness, that interests 
us, not their so-called " truth to nature," 
but their gracefulness and serenity- — their 
" classic repose." .... In the greatest ac- 
tivity there is considerate purpose and per- 
fect self-control manifested. The repose is 
of the soul, and not a physical repose. . . . 
The bearing of exhibits of Greek art on 
American industrial education is obvious. 

One will concede at the start that tool 
work is valuable as industrial training, and 
that especially is this the case with the 



Educatio7ial Nuggets. 



course of study and work in the manual- 
training school. . . . Still more valuable 
must we regard the study of natural science, 
and especially of applied mathematics, in the 
laws of matter and motion. . . . Besides 
this, we may claim that general education is 
of the utmost importance, opening as it does 
the powers of thought and observation, giv- 
ing each laborer an insight into human nature 
and fitting him for logical thinking on all 
subjects ; fitting him alike to lead others and 
combine them in extensive undertakings, and 
likewise to serve faithfully and intelligently 
other leaders when the case requires. . . . 
But esthetic edacation— the cultivation of 
taste, the acquirement of knowledge on the 
subject of the origin of the idea of beauty 
(both its historic origin and the philosophical 
account of its source in human nature), the 
practice of producing the outlines of the 
beautiful by the arts of drawing, painting, 
and modeling, the criticism of works of art 
with a view to discover readily the causes of 
failure or of success in esthetic effects — all 
these things, we must claim, form the true 



William T. Ha7-ris. 131 

foundation of the highest success in the in- 
dustries of any modern nation. 

The dynamic side is needed ; but inven- 
tion of the useful does not succeed in con- 
trolling the markets of the world. A nation 
with its laborers all educated in their taste 
for beautiful forms will give graceful shapes 
to their productions, and command higher 
prices for them. 

In 185 1, at the World's Exposition in Lon- 
don, it became evident that English industries 
were not of such a character as to compete 
with those of France and Belgium. Prince 
Albert, always wise and thoughtful, set 
about a deep-reaching system of education 
that should correct the national defect and 
recover the prestige of British arts and 
manufactures. . . . There began from this 
time a gradual rise in the taste of the Eng- 
lish workman ; from being an artisan pure 
and simple he began to be an artist. Eng- 
land has gone forward rapidly in the direc- 
tion of producing works of taste, and her 
useful manufactures, heretofore made with- 



1 32 Educatioital Nuggeis. 

out much reference to beauty, have steadily 
improved- in tastefulness of design and ex- 
ecution. 

The estabhshment of a great national art 
gallery, the Louvre, and the studies of French 
savants in the canons of good taste, had long 
before revolutionized French manufactures, 
and given France the supremacy in the 
world-market for goods that command high 
prices and ready sale. 

Taking hint from England, we have had 
in this country something of a fever for 
education in art, especially in the lines of 
industrial drawing. Remarkable as has 
been our progress in this matter, yet there is 
a prevalent lack of insight into the true direc- 
tion and significance of this branch. 

From " The Imitative Functions 
IN Childhood." ^ 

Imitation, in its purest and simplest form, 
that of mechanical repetition of the actions 



1 Paper read before the National Council of Educa- 
tion at Asbury Park, N. J., July 7, 1894, 



William T. Harris. 133 

of another person is, by common consent, 
placed at the bottom of spiritual achieve- 
ments. A monkey or a parrot can mimic 
actions or speech, and to call the action of a 
human being parrot-like repetition, or a pro- 
cess of aping, is to express reproach and con- 
tempt for it. 

But there is a consideration connected 
with imitative action which makes it the 
most fruitful approach to psychology, for it 
explains the mode in which the individual 
man unites with his fellow-men to form a 
social whole. It introduces us to the forma- 
tion of institutions, the family, civil commu- 
nity, the State, the church — those greater 
selves which reinforce the little selves of iso- 
lated individuals. For the study of imita- 
tion leads to the discovery of the modes by 
which the individual man repeats for himself 
the thinking and doing and feeling of his 
fellows, and thus enriches his own life by 
adding to it the lives of others. Thus his 
own life becomes vicarious for others, and he 
participates vicariously in the life of society. 



1 34 Educational Nuggets. 

Imitation develops, on the one hand, into 
habits, or customs and morals, and this is 
the will-side of human mind ; and, on the 
other hand, it develops into perception, 
memory, ideas, and insights, this being the 
intellectual side of mind. It is evident that 
the pedagogic interest in psychology is the 
evolution of the higher faculties out of the 
lower. 

It is necessary, first of all, to discover the 
most elementary forms of imitation. In 
this research the students of physical phe- 
nomena have greatly aided. The discovery 
of the fact that a small per cent, of people 
are so sensitive to the mental influences 
about them that they can, without the inter- 
mediation of words, read the thoughts of 
others has been made and verified in numer- 
ous instances. . . . The phrase " hypnotic 
suggestion " has come to play a great role 
in elucidating the rudimentary facts in 
imitation. . . . The rapid progress of scien- 
tific investigation in this field of psychic 
research promises to throw light on all 



Willtam T, Harris. 135 

social thought, feeling, and action. It will 
help us to understand much that has been 
obscure in the rise and spread of popular 
beliefs, the genesis of social tornadoes, like 
the Crusades, the French Revolution, the 
Tartaric invasions of Europe, or even such 
social affairs as strikes and mobs. 

We must not lose sight of the essential 
fact that shows itself even in the most 
rudimentary of the phenomena of imitation. 
There can be no imitation whatever except 
on the part of self-active beings ; in other 
words, only souls can imitate. 

The pride and pleasure that the infant 
exhibits on the occasion of his first conscious 
imitation has its root in this, that he has 
made something his own, has proved him- 
self equal to imitating a movement in him- 
self by his will ; he has revealed his selfhood 
to some extent. This is the significance of 
play, which is chiefly imitation, that the 
undeveloped human being is learning to 
know himself by seeing what he can do. 
He is revealing himself to others and to 



1 36 Ediica tion a I Nuggets. 

himself, and getting strength in his individ- 
uality. 

Thus we see that there is an element of 
originality in the most mechanical phase of 
imitation. The self is active and assimi- 
lative. It sees an external deed, which it 
proceeds to make its own deed by imitation. 
.... Originality grows by progressive 
deepening of the insight into causes and 
motives of the things imitated. . . . There 
comes a time when the imitative child com- 
prehends the principle as well as does the 
master whom he imitates, and then he is 
emancipated from all imitation in this part 
of his education. If he keeps on and com- 
prehends the genesis of the principle from 
deeper principles, he emancipates himself 
from even the " hypnotic suggestion " of the 
principle itself, and all external authority 
has become inward freedom. 

Here, in the stages of orginality, where 
the person has learned to comprehend what 
he once imitated, and now understands it in 
its causes and in the reasons for its exis- 



William T. Harris. 137 

tence, is self-imitation, if we are to speak of 
imitation at all. It is no longer an activity 
at an outward suggestion, but purely- 
spontaneous. It has vanquished the ex- 
ternal object by ascending to its causes. 

From "A Brief for Latin." 1 

The Latin language is by common con- 
sent an essential part of higher education as 
conducted in the colleges, universities, pro- 
fessional and technical schools of the United 
States. ... In fact the number studying 
Latin [in the preparatory schools] is much 
larger than the number fitting for college or 
higher institutions, showing a conviction in 
the minds of the people that Latin is not 
merely an ornamental study but a useful 
study. 

But the revival of the study of Latin has 
extended also to the elementary course of 
instruction which includes the first eight 
years of school work, or, loosely stated, the 
pupils from six to fourteen years of age. 

1 Educational Review. New York : April, 1899. 



138 Educaiio7ial Nuggets. 

An active movement has begun in later 
years to give a portion of these first eight 
years to the study of Latin, and a large 
number of schools now commence Latin in 
the eighth year of the course and some of 
them begin the study of Latin either in the 
eighth or the seventh year. 

To the countries using the romance lan- 
guages, — France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, 
— this revival of the study of Latin may seem 
strange, but it is easily explained v^^hen one 
considers the composition of the English 
language v^^hich, though Germanic or Teu- 
tonic in its colloquial vocabulary and in its 
grammatical structure, nevertheless resorts 
to the Latin and Greek for all its technical 
words and for all those words which express 
fine distinctions of thought or subtile shades 
of sentiment. 

Any large dictionary of English includes 
in its vocabulary three words of Latin or 
Greek origin out of every four. While good 
English contains comparatively few of these 
Latin and Greek terms on a printed page, — 



IVi'llzam T. Harris. 139 

rarely more than from 10 to 16 per cent., — 
yet it will be found that whatever is precise 
and technical in expression, as well as what- 
ever contains fine discriminations of thought 
or delicate shades of feeling, is expressed in 
words of Latin origin. 

In order to understand and use with 
propriety a technical term or a word ex- 
pressing fine discrimination it is necessary to 
understand the colloquial word which cor- 
responds to it ; this is generally a word 
denoting things or events perceivable by the 
senses. 

The illiterate German understands the 
word Wisseiischaft because he recognizes 
the word ivissen in it which he uses every 
day to express the act of knowing ; but the 
Englishman uses the word science and can- 
not recognize in it the root set, which means 
to know, unless he is acquainted with Latin. 

A little study of Latin, such as is given in 
the high schools and academies, is therefore 
very useful to the English thinker, because 



I40 Educational Nuggets. 

it enables him to use with certainty and pre- 
cision the words which express the resuhs 
of careful thinking. 

In a broader sense, however, Latin is 
essential to secondary and higher education 
for all European peoples, in fact for all the 
peoples which have derived their civilization 
from the Romans. It is found that in all 
the modern languages of Europe the dis- 
tinctions of thought regarding the acquire- 
ment and transfer of property, and the 
formation of individuals into corporations 
for municipal or for business purposes, are 
of Latin derivation. 

For the most part, the words expressing 
civil and political relations in all the lan- 
guages of Europe are Latin. 

In view of these considerations it is 
obvious that schools for secondary and for 
elementary, as well as for higher, instruction 
suffer injury if a rule excluding Latin from 
the course of study is rigidly enforced. 



NICHOLAS MURRAY 
BUTLER. 

From " The Meaning of Education." i 

Introduction. 

Education, in the broad sense in which 
I use the term, is the most important of 
human interests, since it deals with the pres- 
ervation of the culture and efficiency that we 
have inherited, and with their extension and 
development ; . . . . This human interest 
can and should be studied in a scientific 
spirit and by a scientific method; .... In 
a democracy at least an education is a fail- 
ure that does not relate itself to the duties 
and opportunities of citizenship. 

To give to education its rightful place in 



^ The Meaning of Education, and Other Essays 
AND Addresses. By Nicholas Murray Butler, Pro- 
fessor of Philosophy and Education in Columbia Uni- 
versity. New York: Macmillan Company, 1898. 



142 Educational Nuggeis. 

our thinking involves relating it to the laws 
of life in general, and especially to those 
laws as viewed from the standpoint of the 
doctrine of evolution. ... In this way the 
theory of education is given what it has 
hitherto lacked, a distinct relationship to the 
facts of organic and social evolution. 

A standard must next be sought by which 
the value of educational processes and influ- 
ences may be judged. I find this standard 
in the conclusion, common, I am confident, 
to the best philosophy and to the soundest 
science alike, that the facts of nature must 
be explained, in the last resort, in terms of 
energy, and that energy in turn can be con- 
ceived only in terms of will, which is the 
fundamental form of the life of mind or 
spirit. 

I offer these two conclusions as the basis 
for an educational philosophy. 

The Meaning of Education. 

The child receives first, and in a short 
series of years, his animal inheritance ; it 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 143 

then remains for us in the period of educa- 
tion to see to it that he comes into his human 
inheritance. 

The great educational temple of modern 
times into which every civilized nation is 
pouring- out its strength and its treasure, 
rests upon the two corner-stones of the 
physical and psychical nature of the child 
and the traditional and hereditary civiliza- 
tion of the race. . . . The problem of the 
family, of the school, and of the home, is to 
unite those two elements so that each shall 
possess the other. We shall then have a 
conception of education which is in accord 
with the doctrine of evolution, and which is 
in accord with the teachings of modern 
science and of modern philosophy. 

The scientific inheritance is one of the 
very first elements of a modern liberal edu- 
cation, because it is that element which pre- 
sents itself earliest to the senses of the child. 
It is the element with which he comes in 
immediate sense-contact ; to which he can 
be first led ; from which he may be made to 



144 Educational Nuggets. 

understand and draw lessons of the deepest 
significance for his life and for that adapta- 
tion which is his education. 

Just as scientific method is the gate to the 
scientific inheritance and therefore must in 
essence at least be mastered, so language is 
the gate to the literary inheritance and must 
be mastered at the earliest opportunity. . . . 
Language is the crystallized thought of the 
past. It contains in itself, in its products 
and its forms, in its delicate discriminations, 
its powers of comparison and abstraction, a 
record of the progress of the thought of the 



In the education that is sometimes called 
" new," it will be found that the earliest 
linguistic exercises are almost always based 
upon something that is really worth know- 
ing for its own sake. Our literatures the 
world over, ancient and modern, are so rich, 
so full of thought and feeling and action, 
that there is no time to waste in the merely 
formal exercises of grammatical drill upon 
lifeless material, when we may be occupying 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 145 

ourselves, in those same exercises and for 
the same purpose of discipline, with material 
that enriches the human mind and touches 
and refines the human heart. 

The third element in education is the 
esthetic inheritance, that feeling for the 
beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime, 
that has always been so great a part of hu- 
man life, that contributes so much to human 
pleasure and accentuates so much of human 
pain and suffering. 

To-day we find art creeping into the 
school-room; instruction in color, in form, 
in expression is being given. The growing 
child is surrounded with representations of 
the classic in art, and so, unconsciously 
and by imitation, he is being taught to adapt 
and adjust himself to this once forgotten and 
now recovered element in human civiliza- 
tion ; an element that certainly is, like the 
scientific and literary elements, an integral 
part of the child's inheritance. 

Then there is also the wonderful institu- 



146 Educational Nuggets. 

tional inheritance, most wonderful of all, be- 
cause it brings us into immediate contact 
with the human race itself. 

We have wrested that institutional life 
from history, and it is going to-day into the 
education of children all over the civilized 
world. In this way they are being given 
their institutional inheritance ; they are being 
given some insight not alone into their rights, 
which are so easy to teach, but into their 
duties, which are so easy to forget ; and the 
institutional life that carries with it lessons 
of duty, responsibility and the necessity for 
co-operation in the working out of high 
ideals, is being put before children wherever 
sound education is given to-day, from the 
kindergarten to the university. 

Finally, there is the religious inheritance 
of the child. No student of history can 
doubt its existence and no observer of hu- 
man nature will undervalue its significance. 
We are still far from comprehending fully 
the preponderant influence of religion in 
shaping our contemporary civilization ; an 



Nicholas Murray Btitler, i^'j 

influence that is due in part to the universal- 
ity of religion itself, and in part to the fact 
that it was, beyond dispute, the chief human 
interest at the time when the foundations of 
our present superstructure were being laid. 

The growing tendency toward what is 
known as the separation of church and state, 
but what is more accurately described as the 
independence of man's political and religious 
relationships, and, concurrently, the develop- 
ment of a public educational conscience 
V\^hich has led the state to take upon itself a 
large share of the responsibility for educa- 
tion, have brought about the practical exclu- 
sion of the religious element from public 
education. 

Yet the religious element may not be per- 
mitted to pass wholly out of education unless 
we are to cripple it and render it hopelessly 
incomplete. It must devolve upon the fam- 
ily and the church. ... It is enough to 
point out that the religious element of human 
culture is essential ; and that, by some effec- 
tive agency, it must be presented to every 



148 Educatio7ial Nuggets. 

child whose education aims at completeness 
or proportion. 

What Knowledge is of Most Worth ? 

If it be true that spirit and reason rule the 
universe, then the highest and most endur- 
ing knowledge is of the things of the spirit. 
That subtile sense of the beautiful and the 
sublime which accompanies spiritual insight, 
and is part of it, — this is the highest achieve- 
ment of which humanity is capable. It is 
typified, in various forms, in the verse of 
Dante and the prose of Thomas k Kempis, 
in the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, and in 
Mozart's Requiem. To develop this sense 
in education is the task of art and literature, 
to interpret it is the work of philosophy, and 
to nourish it the function of religion. Be- 
cause it most fully represents the highest 
nature of man, it is man's highest possession, 
and those studies that directly appeal to it 
and instruct it are beyond compare the most 
valuable. 

Properly interpreted, the study of nature 
may be classed among the humanities as 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 149 

truly as the study of language itself, . . . 
The study of nature is entitled to recognition 
on grounds similar to those put forward for 
the study of literature, of art, and of history. 

In every field of knowledge which we are 
studying is some law or phase of energy, 
and the original as well as the highest energy 
is will. In the world of nature it is exhibited 
in one series of forms, those which produce 
the results known to us as chemical, physi- 
cal, biological ; in the history of mankind, 
it is manifested in the forms of feelings, 
thoughts, deeds, institutions. Because the 
elements of self-consciousness and reflection 
are present in the latter series and absent in 
the former, it is to these and the knowledge 
of them that we must accord the first place 
in any table of educational values. 

Immediate utility makes demand upon 
the school which it is unable wholly to neg- 
lect. 

There are utilities higher and utilities lower, 
and under no circumstances will the true 



1 50 Educatiojtal Nuggets. 

teacher ever permit the former to be sacri- 
ficed to the latter. This would be done if, 
in its zeal for fitting the child for self-support, 
the school were to neglect to lay the founda- 
tion for that higher intellectual and spiritual 
life which constitutes humanity's full stature. 
This foundation is made ready only if proper 
emphasis be laid, from the kindergarten to 
the college, on those studies whose subject- 
matter is the direct product of intelligence 
and will, and which can, therefore, make 
direct appeal to man's higher nature. 

Man's will gradually frees itself from 
bondage to a chain of causes determined for 
it from without, and attains to a power of 
independent self-determination according to 
durable and continuing ends of action. This 
constitutes character, which, in Emerson's 
fine phrase, is the moral order seen through 
the medium of an individual nature. 

While no knowledge is worthless, — for it 
all leads us back to the common cause and 
ground of all, — yet that knowledge is of 
most worth which stands in closest relation 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 151 

to the highest forms of the activity of that 
spirit which is created in the image of Him 
who holds nature and man ahke in the hol- 
low of His hand. 

Is There a New Education ? 

There are three avenues of scientific ap- 
proach to the study of education, and in each 
of them the evolutionary point of view is 
not only illuminating but controlling. These 
three avenues are the physiological, the psy- 
chological, and the new sociological. 

The Greeks alone understood the educa- 
tional value of play. Their great national 
games combined systematic physical training 
and play in a way that we have not yet suc- 
ceeded in equalling. ... In Germany sys- 
tematic physical training is made much of in 
education, but genuine play is not prominent. 
In England, on the contrary, play has been 
found so successful in developing strength 
and suppleness of body and sturdy, inde- 
pendent character that anything approaching 
systematic, formal training is regarded as al- 



1 52 Educational Nuggets. 

most unnecessary. In this country the 
present tendency is to develop both elements. 

But physical and physiological considera- 
tions cut far deeper than this. They de- 
mand a hearing when we have under dis- 
cussion questions of school hours and 
recesses, of programmes and tasks, of school 
furniture, of textbooks and blackboards, of 
light, heat, and fresh air. . . . College faculties 
and school teachers, framers of examination 
tests, donors of laboratories and dormitories, 
and, most of all, architects, are, as a rule, 
oblivious to the vital interest that the pupil 
has in matters of this kind. Considerations 
of tradition, convenience, cost, and external 
appearance are allowed full swing, and the 
growing youth must fit the Procrustean bed 
as best they can. 

We need to be strongly reminded that 
wickedness is closely akin to weakness, and 
then to consider the moral consequences of 
our physiological ignorance. 

The relation of psychology to education is 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 153 

the one subject on which the teacher of to- 
day is supposed to be informed. . . . Yet a 
careful inspection of the most popular text- 
books in use, and visits to some hundred 
classrooms, have convinced me that the re- 
sults of this knowledge, if it exists, are, in 
the field of secondary and higher education, 
almost 7til. In this respect the elementary 
teacher is far in advance. 

They [teachers] are content to accumu- 
late what they are pleased to term " experi- 
ence " ; but their relation to education is 
just that of the motorman on a trolley-car 
to the science of electricity. They use it ; 
but of its nature, principles, and processes 
they are profoundly ignorant. The one quali- 
fication most to be feared in a teacher and 
the one to be most carefully inquired into, 
is this same " experience " when it stands 
alone. I am profoundly distrustful of it. 

The pure empiricist never can have any 
genuine experience, any more than an ani- 
mal, because he is unable to interrogate the 
phenomena that present themselves to him, 



1 54 Educational Nuggets. 

and hence is unable to understand them. 
The scientific teacher, the theorist, on the 
contrary, asks what manner of phenomena 
these are that are before him, what are their 
inner relations, and the principles on which 
they are based. 

This habit [of watching minds, and of 
watching them closely] is the surest road to 
good teaching, and its formation is the ^^best 
service that psychology can render to the 
classroom. Until a teacher has acquired the 
habit and subordinated his schoolroom pro- 
cedure to it, he is not teaching at all ; at 
best he is either lecturing or hearing recita- 
tions. 

We are chiefly indebted to the students 
and followers of Herbart for the present 
wide-spread interest in this country in two 
psychological doctrines of the greatest impor- 
tance for all teaching — the doctrine of apper- 
ception and the doctrine of interest. The for- 
mer has to do with mental assimilation, the lat- 
ter with the building of character and ideals. 



Nicholas Mtcrray Butler. 155 

The mind is not a passive recipient of the 
impressions that reach it ; .... it reacts 
upon them, colors them, and makes them a 
part of itself in accordance with the tendency, 
the point of view, and the possessions that 
it already has. This tendency, this point of 
view, and these possessions differ in the 
case of every individual. Instead of over- 
looking or seeking to annul these differences, 
we should first understand them and base 
our teaching upon them. 

I have known case after case in which the 
opposite policy of treating all upon one plane, 
and making the same demands upon all, has 
made a college course a source of positive 
harm. 

The situation is not very different with 
respect to the doctrine of interest. ... It 
is a common thing to hear it said that since 
life is full of obstacles and character is 
strengthened by overcoming them, so the 
school and college course should not hesi- 
tate to compel students to do distasteful 
and difficult things simply because they are 



1 56 Educational Nuggets. 

distasteful and difficult. I do not hesitate 
to say that I believe that doctrine to be pro- 
foundly immoral and its consequences 
calamitous. 

The proper and scientific course is to 
search for the pupil's empirical and natural 
interests, and to build upon them. This is 
not always easy ; it requires knowledge, pa- 
tience, and skill. It is far easier to treat 
the entire class alike. 

I earnestly commend to every teacher the 
study of these two principles, apperception 
and interest. I do so in the firm belief that 
the practical result of that study would be 
an immense uplifting of the teaching 
efficiency of every educational institution in 
the United States. 

What, for lack of a better term, I call the 
sociological aspect of education is, in many 
respects, the most important of all. . . . The 
first question to be asked of any course of 
study is, Does it lead to knowledge of our 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 1 57 

contemporary civilization ? If not, it is 
neither efficient nor liberal. 

In society as it exists to-day the dominant 
note, running through all our struggles and 
problems, is economic, — what the old Greeks 
might have called political. Yet it is a con- 
stant fight to get any proper teaching from 
the economic and social point of view put 
before high-school and college students. 

We can leave questions as to the undula- 
tory theory of light and as to Grimm's and 
Verner's laws to the specialists ; but we 
may not do the same thing with questions 
as to production and exchange, as to mone- 
tary policy and taxation. The course of 
study is not liberal, in this century, that does 
not recognize these facts and emphasize 
economics as it deserves. I cite but this one 
instance of conflict between the inherited 
and the scientifically constructed course of 
study. 

Dr. Johnson's acumen was equal to draw- 
ing a distinction between the new as the 



158 Educational Nuggets. 

hitherto non-existent, the new as the com- ; 

paratively recent, and the new as the \ 

hitherto unfamiliar. In each and all of i 

these senses of the word, I am confident \ 

that there is a new education. \ 

Democracy and Education. i 

Most striking and impressive of all move- : 

ments of the century is the political develop- j 

ment toward the form of government known ^ 

as democracy. Steadily and doggedly j 

throughout the ten decades the movement i 

toward democracy has gone its conquering ; 
way. 

So long as the direction of man's institu- \ 

tional life was in the hands of one or the j 

few, the need for a wide diffusion of politi- I 

cal intelligence was not strongly felt. The \ 
divine right of kings found its correlative in 

the diabolical ignorance of the masses. • • • ; 

But the rapid widening of the basis of ; 

sovereignty has changed all that. No j 

deeper conviction pervades the people of i 

the United States and of France, who are ; 

the most aggressive exponents of democracy, i 



Nicholas Murray Butler, 1 59 

than that the preservation of liberty under 
the law, and of the institutions that are our 
precious possession and proud heritage, 
depends upon the intelligence of the whole 
people. It is on this unshakable foundation 
that the argument for public education at 
public expense really rests. 

The teachers of the country should 
address themselves to this question with 
determination and zeal. Instruction in 
civil government is good ; the inculcation of 
patriotism is good ; the flag upon the school- 
house is good. But all these devices lie 
upon the surface. The real question in- 
volved is ethical. It reaches deep down to 
the very foundations of morality. 

The public education of a great demo- 
cratic people has other aims to fulfil than the 
extension of scientific knowledge or the 
development of literary culture. It must 
prepare for intelligent citizenship. 

The good citizen is not the querulous 
critic of public men and public affairs, how- 



l6o Ediccational Nuggets. 

ever intelligent he may be ; he is rather the 
constant participator in political struggles, 
who has well-grounded convictions and a 
strong determination to influence, by all 
honorable means, the opinion of the com- 
munity. Were it otherwise, universal suf- 
frage would not be worth having, and public 
education would be a luxury, not a necessity. 

The spoils system is absolutely undemo- 
cratic and utterly unworthy of toleration by 
an intelligent people. . . . We teachers are 
the first to insist that incompetent and un- 
trained persons shall not be allowed in the 
service of the schools. Why, then, should 
we tolerate the sight of a house-painter, 
instead of an engineer, supervising the 
streets and roadways of a city of a hundred 
thousand inhabitants, or that of an illiterate 
hanger-on presiding over the public works 
of a great metropolis ? These instances, 
drawn at random from recent political his- 
tory, are typical of conditions that will be 
found widely diffused throughout our public 
service. 



Nicholas Murray Butler. i6i 

The difficulties of democracy are the op- 
portunities of education. If our education 
be sound, if it lay due emphasis on individ- 
ual responsibility for social and political pro- 
gress, if it counteract the anarchistic tenden- 
cies that grow out of selfishness and greed, 
if it promote a patriotism that reaches 
farther than militant jingoism and gunboats, 
then we may cease to have any doubts as to 
the perpetuity and integrity of our institu- 
tions. 

I am profoundly convinced that the great- 
est educational need of our time, in higher 
and lower schools alike, is a fuller apprecia- 
tion on the part of the teachers of what 
human institutions really mean and what 
tremendous moral issues and principles they 
involve. 

College and University. 
In order to become great — indeed, in 
order to exist at all — a university must rep- 
resent the national life and minister to it. 

With all its undisputed excellences, the 



1 62 Educational Nuggets. \ 

German system would not meet our needs \ 

so well as the yet unsystematic, but remark- : 

ably effective, organization that circum- I 

stances have brought into existence. j 

But using the word [University] in a i 
broader, and, I believe, a truer sense, — the i 
sense that, while not confounding it with a ' 
college, however large or however ancient, ! 
nor applying it un mistakenly to a college 
and a surrounding group of technical and 
professional faculties or schools, yet extends 
the term to include any institution where ; 
students, adequately tramed by previous 
study of the liberal arts and sciences, are ' 
led into special fields of learning and i 
research by teachers of high excellence and 
originality ; and where, by the agency of \ 
libraries, museums, laboratories, and publica- j 
tions, knowledge is conserved, advanced, and \ 
disseminated — in this sense one may per- I 
haps count six or eight American universi- 
ties in existence to-day, and half as many ; 
more in the process of making. 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 163 

Of the 481 American colleges, perhaps no 
two have precisely the same course of study 
or the same equipment ; but the common 
features that distinguish them are well 
known. . . . Wherever it is found, whether 
on the Atlantic seaboard, in some inland 
town of the West or South, or on the Pacific 
slope, the college is a force making for a 
broader intellectual life and a higher type of 
citizenship. It leaves to the university the 
task of educating specialists, investigators, 
and scientifically trained members of the 
learned professions. 

The main obstacle to the full establish- 
ment in America of the pursuit of science 
for its own sake, as a controlling university 
principle, is the development and rapid 
growth of technical schools, with low stand- 
ards of entrance, in connection with univer- 
sities, and their admission to a full and even 
controlling share in university legislation 
and administration. Indeed, in this lies the 
chief danger to the integrity of American 
university development. 



1 64 Educational Nuggets. 

Whatever public opinion may rest satis- 
fied with, it seems indisputable that uni- 
versities owe it to themselves to put their 
stamp upon no graduates in law, medicine, 
and technology who are not liberally edu- 
cated men. 

What science and practical life alike need 
is not narrow men, but broad men sharp- 
ened to a point. To train such is the 
highest function of the American university ; 
and by its success in producing them must 
its efficiency be finally judged, 

From " Scope and Function of 
Secondary Education." i 

What is secondary education? . . . . 
The very name secondary implies that it has 
reference to a primary or elementary edu- 
cation that comes before it. This elemen- 
tary education I define as that general 
training in the elements of knowledge that 
is suitable for a pupil from the age of six or 
seven to the period of adolescence. It is 



' The Educational Review — June, 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 165 

ordinarily organized in eight or nine grades 
eacli occupying an academic year. Nine 
grades are too many and are distinctly 
wasteful. . o . An'eight-years' course is cer- 
tainly ample for any community, and children 
should be given every encouragement and 
every opportunity to cover the elementary 
studies in even less time. 

The marked characteristics of the pupil of 
secondary school age are due to the fact 
that, as Rousseau puts it, we are born 
twice : the first time into existence, the 
second time into life ; the first time as a 
member of the race, the second as a mem- 
ber of the sex — in other words, they are due 
to the phenomena of adolescence. 

These facts point directly to the essential 
characteristics of secondary-school studies. 
They must, in the first place, be comparative 
and reflective in character in order to pro- 
vide food for the newly discovered intellec- 
tual capacities ; in the second place, they 
must be and continue to become more and 
more difficult, in order to occupy and develop 



1 66 Educa t zonal Nuggets. 

the augmented nervous and mental energy 
that now presents itself ; and in the third 
place, the tendency to introspection and 
analysis must be satisfied by the disclosing 
of the inner connections and deep reasons of 
the subjects taught. 

Secondary studies make their appearance, 
and ought to make their appearance, in the 
upper grades of the elementary schools. 
The law of educational continuity demands 
this, and there is no other way to escape 
from the dreaded arrested development 
which falls like a pall upon so many of our 
school children. 

As power is gained only by exercise, 
schoolmasters are beginning to find out that 
the quickest and surest way to lead pupils 
to the mastery of a given task is, after trying 
it a few times, not to review it indefinitely 
but to go forward to something more dififi- 
cult. Good teaching will always keep a 
pupil's mind taut; to let it grow slack 
increases the friction and the waste. 

Just as secondary studies take their rise 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 1 67 

almost unnoticed among and out of the ele- 
mentary studies, so they pass insensibly into 
those of college grade. The college point 
of view is more elevated, its scope broader, 
its methods still more reflective and abstract 
than those of the secondary school ; but no 
one can say dogmatically just where the one 
ends and the other begins. 

Not the relative difficulty of studies, but 
their relations to each other, to the develop" 
ing powers of the pupil, and to contem- 
porary civilization, determine their order 
during the secondary and college periods. 

The chief difficulty with secondary-school 
courses — and I am in the habit of studying 
scores of them every year — is that they in- 
clude too many subjects pursued for too 
short a time. The horrible specter of 
" Fourteen Weeks," in this, that, or the 
other subject still haunts many schools, and 
an unintelligent ambition or a foolish local 
vanity contemplates it with ill-concealed 
satisfaction. 



1 68 Educational Nuggets. 

The dissipation of energy and the shatter- 
ing of the highly coveted power of concen- 
tration that must follow any attempt to keep 
track of such an educational kaleidoscope, 
can better be imagined than described. 

It is essential that studies should be or- 
ganized in courses, and these courses may be 
as numerous and as diverse as the school 
can afford or as the community demands. 
These courses should not be rigid and com- 
pulsory : that involves another and hardly 
less serious danger. They should be flexible 
and elective, made by each pupil for himself 
with the aid of his parents and teachers. 

Each course should admit of attention to 
not more than five subjects at once, and each 
subject should be pursued long enough to 
gain such mastery of it as will cause it to yield 
to the student some considerable part of its 
educational value. 

These flexible and elective courses. . . . 
must, of course, be organized about a 
common center or core. . . . The three 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 169 

constituent elements of this center or core, 
I state in this way : (i) the study of lan- 
guage : (2) the study of deductive reasoning, 
in mathematics and formal logic ; (3) the 
study of inductive method, in experimental 
science and, in part, in history. 

It is in this ehmination of elementary 
studies from the secondary school and in 
the frank recognition of the paramount 
advantages of the elective system, that I 
see the way of highest usefulness opening 
before the secondary school. Instead of 
conducing to arrested development, it will 
then constantly spur the pupil on by putting 
new difficulties before him. 

Mr. Herbert Spencer has told us that 
mankind, like a group of men selected at 
haphazard, is made up of a few clever in- 
dividuals, many ordinary ones, and some 
decidedly stupid. The secondary school 
must recognize this fact, and not make the 
common mistake in trying to deal with a 
supposititious " average pupil " : there is no 
average pupil. 



1 70 Educational Nuggets. 

During the secondary-school period, I 
repeat, tastes are to be developed into 
capacities and each pupil started on that 
line of interest and activity that is best 
adapted to him. 

From " The Argument for Manual 
Training." 1 

The immediate end in all formal education 
is the development of the mind's powers and 
capacities. This end is always the same 
and is never absent. The means of educa- 
tion, on the other hand, are continually 
changing and depend upon two varying 
factors — our knowledge of the child's mind 
and the character of its environment. 
These two factors vary with the progress of 
knowledge, and are not quite the same in 
two consecutive decades, probably wholly 
different in two consecutive centuries. 

Technical education is a training in some 
particular trade, industry, or set of trades or 



1 Teachers' Manuals, No. ii. New York and 
Chicago : E. L. Kellogg & Co., 1888. 



Nicholas Murray Butler. 171 

industries, with a view to fitting the pupil to 
pursue it or them as the means of gaining a 
livelihood. It is a special education, like 
that of the lawyer or the physician. It 
takes for granted a general education and 
builds upon it as a foundation. Industrial 
education, on the other hand, is the founda- 
tion itself. It is the general and common 
training which underhes all instruction in 
particular techniques. 

The manual training movement, as we 
know it, is new. It was put upon a strictly 
scientific basis a very short time ago indeed. 
But it has been " in the air," as the saying 
is, for a long time. Over two hundred and 
fifty years ago Comenius prescribed manual 
training as part of the true curriculum. 

Froebel in his Kindergarten reduced 
theory to practice, and in the Kindergarten 
all manual training, as well as all rational 
and systematic education, has its basis. 

Manual training is mental training through 
the hand and eye, just as the study of history 



172 Educational Nuggets. 

is mental training through the memory and 
other powers. 

Industrial education is a protest against 
this mental oligarchy, the rule of a few 
faculties. It is a demand for mental democ- 
racy, in which each power of mind, even the 
humblest, shall be permitted to occupy the 
place that is its due. 

Too much stress cannot be laid upon the 
fact that manual training, as we use the 
term, is mental training. . . . What is it 
that models the graceful form and strikes 
the true blow, the muscles or the mind ? ^ 
It is the mind that feels and fashions, and 
the mind that sees ; the hand and the eye 
are the instruments which it uses. 

It is not the business of the public school 
to turn out draughtsmen, or carpenters, or 
metal-workers, or cooks, or seamstresses, or 
modelers. Its aim is to send out boys and 
girls that are well and harmoniously trained 



' Do the retina and optic nerves see, or does the 
mind > 



Nicholas Murray Butler. iy2> 

to take their part in life. It is because 
manual training contributes to this end, that 
it is advocated. 

For educational purposes we may agree 
that the mental powers are roughly divisible 
into two classes, the receptive and the 
expressive or active. By means of the 
former the child is put into possession of 
new facts, and by means of the second he 
makes these facts his own and uses them in 
practical life. As food will not nourish un- 
less assimilated, so knowledge, or mental 
food, is not really knowledge, is not really 
possessed, until we have so gained control 
of it as to be able to express or use it. 

Man can express his mental state or ideas 
by the use of language, by gesture, by de- 
lineation, and by construction. . . . The 
argument for manual training insists that 
each of these modes of expression must be 
considered, and that for the training of each 
a method must be devised. 

It is essential in training both the powers 



174 Educational Nuggets. 

of reception and the powers of expression 
that the child deal with things and objects, 
and not alone with what some one has said 
or written about things. 

Reading and writing are the only studies 
in the traditional group that train expression. 
. . . But even when well taught they are not 
adequate to the full demands of the mental 
powers of expression, for they rarely occupy 
more than ten per cent, of the school time, 
except in the very lowest primary grades. 

The powers of expression by delineation 
and construction are trained by the recipro- 
cal instruction in drawing and in constructive 
work. It is proved that the boy who can 
draw a cube, or he who can carve or mold 
one from wood or clay, knows more that is 
worth knowing about the cube than he who 
can merely repeat its geometrical definition. 

Drawing lies at the basis of all manual 
training, and is to be taught in every grade 
as a means of expression of thought, only 
incidentally as an art. 



Nicholas Murray Butler, 175 

Common-school education in the United 
States in these closing years of the nine- 
teenth century .... demands that the ob- 
servation, the judgment, and the executive 
faculty be trained at school as well as the 
memory and the reason. Despite the fact 
that the three former are the most important 
faculties that the human mind possesses, it 
is astounding how completely they are over- 
looked in the ordinary course of study. 

We must bear in mind the growth of 
large cities and our unprecedented commer- 
cial and industrial development. . . . Indefi- 
nitely more people than ever before have to 
employ their observation, their judgment 
and their executive faculty, and employ 
them accurately, in the performance of their 
daily duties. For them, and through them, 
for all of us, the conditions of practical life 
have changed and are changing. Has the 
school responded to the new burdens thus 
laid upon it ? The argument for manual 
training says no, it has not. A more com- 
prehensive, a broader, a more practical train- 
ing is necessary. 



176 Edticatio7ial Nuggets. 

It is unquestionable that many of our 
social troubles originate in misunderstand- 
ings about labor and in false judgments as 
to what labor really is. ... If manual train- 
ing is accorded its proper place in education, 
if we come to see that manual work has in 
it a valuable disciplinary and educational 
element, our eyes will be opened as to its 
real dignity and men will cease to regard it 
as beneath them and their children. This is 
what I would call the social argument for 
manual training. 

The economic argument is similar. It 
points out that the vast majority of our 
public-school children must earn their living 
with their hands, and therefore if the school 
can aid them in using their hands it is put- 
ting just so much bread and butter into 
their mouths. 

I cordially indorse the pungent aphorism of 
Dr. Munger : " Education is to teach us how 
to live, not how to make a living." But 
while standing firmly on that platform, I do 
say that if the best and most complete edu- 



Nicholas Mu7'r ay Butler. 177 

cation happens to aid a boy in earning his 
living that is no reason why it should be 
supplanted by something less thorough and 
less complete. 

A movement at once so philosophic and 
so far-reaching as that in favor of manual 
training. ... is the educational question of 
the time. 

The forces of conservatism are arrayed 
against it as something new, and it is doubt- 
less well that it is so, for education is alto- 
gether too important a matter to be swayed 
by any and every crude theory. Any new 
movement to establish itself in education 
must run a gauntlet of opposition and criti- 
cism, the safe passage of which is a guarantee 
of excellence. This gauntlet the manual- 
training movement has successfully run, and 
it is to-day the newest phase of educational 
thought. 



CHARLES WILLIAM 
ELIOT. 

From "Educational Reform." i 

hiaugural Address : 

As President of Harvard College. 

October 19, 1869. 

The endless controversies whether lan- 
guage, philosophy, mathematics or science 
supplies the best mental training, whether 
general education should be chiefly literary 
or chiefly scientific, have no practical lesson 
for us to-day. . . . we would have them all 
and at their best. 

To observe keenly, to reason soundly, and 
to imagine vividly are operations as essential 
as that of clear and forcible expression ; and 



1 Educational Reform : Essays and Addresses. 
Charles W. Eliot. NewYork : The Century Co., 
1898. 



1 80 Educational Nuggets. 

to develop one of these faculties it is not 
necessary to repress and dwarf the others. 

Science no more than poetry finds its best 
warrant in its utility. Truth and right are 
above utility in all realms of truth and action. 

The actual problem to be solved is not 
what to teach, but how to teach. 

In education the individual traits of differ- 
ent minds have not been sufiiciently attended 
to. Through all the period of boyhood the 
school studies should be representative ; all 
the main fields of knowledge should be en- 
tered upon. . . . When the revelation of his 
own peculiar taste and capacity comes to 
a young man, let him reverently give it wel- 
come, thank God, and take courage. 

The elective system fosters scholarship, 
because it gives free play to the natural pref- 
erences and inborn aptitudes, makes possi- 
ble enthusiasm for a chosen work, relieves 
the professor and the ardent disciple of the 
presence of a body of students who are com- 



Charles William Eliot. i8i 

pelled to an unwelcome task, and enlarges 
instruction by substituting many and various 
lessons given to small, lively classes, for a 
few lessons many times repeated to different 
sections of a numerous class. 

Both are useful — lectures, for inspiration, 
guidance, and the comprehensive method- 
izing which only one who has a view of the 
whole field can rightly contrive ; recitations, 
for securing and testifying a thorough mas- 
tery on the part of the pupil of the treatise 
or author in hand, for conversational com- 
ment and amplification, for emulation and 
competition. 

In spite of the familiar picture of the moral 
dangers which environ the student, there is 
no place so safe as a good college during the 
critical passage from boyhood to man- 
hood. ... Its public opinion, though easily 
led astray, is still high in the main. Its 
scholarly tastes and habits, its eager friend- 
ships and quick hatreds, its keen debates, 
its frank discussions of character, and of 
deep political and religious questions, all are 



1 8 2 Educational Nuggets. 

safeguards against sloth, vulgarity, or de- 
pravity. Its society and, not less, its soli- 
tudes are full of teaching. 

What is a Liberal Education ? 
1^884. 

Some of the studies now commonly called 
liberal have not long held their preemi- 
nence; .... new learning has repeatedly 
forced its way, in times past, to full academic 
standing. . . . History teaches boldness in 
urging the claims of modern literatures and 
sciences to full recognition as liberal arts. 

The first subject which, as I conceive, is 
entitled to recognition as of equal academic 
value or rank with any subject now most 
honored is the English language and litera- 
ture. 

The next subjects for which I claim a 
position of academic equality with Greek, 
Latin, and Mathematics are French and 
German. This claim rests. ... on the mag- 
nitude and worth of the literatures, and on 
the unquestionable fact that facility in read- 



Charles WilUain Eliot. 183 

ing these languages is absolutely indispen- 
sable to a scholar, whatever may be his 
department of study. 

The next subject which demands an en- 
tirely different position from that it now 
occupies in American schools and colleges 
is history. If any study is liberal and liberal- 
izing, it is the modern study of history — the 
study of the passions, opinions, behefs, arts, 
laws, and institutions of different races or 
communities, and of the joys, sufferings, con- 
flicts and achievements of mankind. 

Closely allied to the study of history is the 
study of the new science called political 
economy, or public economics. . . . When 
we consider how formidable are the indus- 
trial, social, and political problems with which 
the next generation must grapple. , . . we 
can hardly fail to appreciate the importance 
of offering to large numbers of American 
students ample facilities for learning all that 
is known of economic science. 

The last subject for which I claim admis- 



1 84 Educational Nuggets. 

sion to the magic circle of the Hberal arts is 
natural science. 

Natural science is to be studied not in 
books but in things. . » . The student of 
natural science scrutinizes, touches, weighs, 
measures, analyzes, dissects, and watches 
things. By these exercises his powers of ob- 
servation and judgment are trained, and he 
acquires the precious habit of observing the 
appearances, transformations, and processes 
of nature. „ . . He acquires the scientific 
method of study in the field. . » „ the patient, 
cautious, sincere, self-directing spirit of 
natural science. 

Since the beginning of this century they 
[the arts built upon chemistry, physics, bot- 
any, zoology, and geology] have wrought 
wonderful changes in the physical relation of 
man to the earth which he inhabits, in na- 
tional demarcations, in industrial organiza- 
tion, in governmental functions, and in the 
modes of domestic life ; and they will cer- 
tainly do as much for the twentieth century 
as they have done for ours. 



Charles William Eliot. i8$ 

If the list of liberal arts is extended, as I 
have urged, it is manifest that no man can 
cover the whole ground and get a thorough 
knowledge of any subject. Hence the ne- 
cessity of allowing the student to choose 
among many co ordinate studies the few to 
which he will devote himself. 

It is a waste for society, and an outrage 
upon the individual, to make a boy spend the 
years when he is most teachable in a disci- 
pline the end of which he can never reach, 
when he might have spent them in a differ- 
ent discipline, which would have been re- 
warded by achievement. Herein lies the 
fundamental reason for options among school 
as well as college studies, all of which are lib- 
eral. 

A mental discipline which takes no account 
of differences of capacity and taste is not 
well directed. It follows that there must be 
variety in education instead of uniform pre- 
scription. 



1 86 Ediccatioiial Nuggets. 

Liberty in Education. 
1885. 

A university of liberal arts and sciences 
must give its students three things : 

I. Freedom in choice of studies. . . . The 
individual enjoys most that intellectual labor 
for which he is the most fit ; and society is best 
served when every man's peculiar skill, fa- 
culty, or aptitude is developed and utilized to 
the highest possible degree. 

There exist certain natural guides and 
safeguards for every youth who is called 
upon in a free university to choose his own 
studies. ... He cannot avoid taking up a 
subject which he has already studied about 
where he left off, and every new subject at 
the beginning and "not in the middle. . . . 
Every advanced course, whether in language, 
philosophy, history, mathematics, or science, 
presupposes acquaintance with some ele- 
mentary course or courses. . . . There is a 
prevailing tendency on the part of every 
competent student to carry far any congenial 
subject once entered upon. ... So effective 



Charles Williajn Eliot. 187 

are these natural safeguards against fickle- 
ness and inconsecutiveness in the choice of 
studies that artificial regulation is superflu- 
ous. 

I have never known a student of any ca- 
pacity to select for himself a set of studies 
covering four years which did not apparently 
possess more theoretical and practical merit 
for his case than the required curriculum of 
my college days. 

But what becomes, under such a system, 
of the careless, indifferent, lazy boys who 
have no bent or intellectual ambition of any 
sort ? . . . . What becomes of such boys 
under the uniform compulsory system .?.... 
It really does not make much difference 
what these una wakened minds dawdle with. 
There is, however, much more chance that 
such young men will get roused from their 
lethargy under an elective system than under 
a required. 

II. A university must give its students 
opportunity to win distinction in special sub- 



1 88 Educational Nuggets. 

jects or lines of study. The uniform curric- 
ulum led to a uniform degree, the first 
scholar and the last receiving the same 
diploma. A university. . . . must provide 
academic honors at graduation for distin- 
guished attainments in single subjects. 

III. A university must permit its students, 
in the main, to govern themselves. ... It 
is not the business of a university to train 
men for those functions in M^hich implicit 
obedience is of the first importance. On the 
contrary, it should train men for those occu- 
pations in which self-government, indepen- 
dence, and originating power are pre emi- 
nently needed. 

Such a university is the safest place in the 
world for young men who have anything in 
them. . . . The student lives in a bracing 
atmosphere ; books engage him ; good com- 
panionships invite him ; good occupations 
defend him ; helpful friends surround him ; 
pure ideals are held up before him ; ambition 
spurs him ; honor beckons him. 



Charles William Eliot. 



Can School Programmes be Shortetied and 
Enriched? 1888. 

The subject seems to be one chiefly inter- 
esting to colleges [as relating to earlier col- 
lege entrance] but really has a much broader 
scope. . . . Whatever improves the school 
programmes for those children whose educa- 
tion is to be prolonged, perhaps, until they 
are twenty-five years old, will improve the 
programmes also for the less fortunate 
children whose education is to be briefer. 

In the first place, better programmes need 
better teachers. 

The American schools will never equal the 
schools of Germany and France until well- 
proved teachers can secure a tenure during 
good behavior and efficiency, like teachers 
in those countries. 

The average skill of the teachers in the 
public schools may be increased by raising 
the present low proportion of male teachers 
in the schools. . . . This superiority of men 



1 90 Educational Nuggets. 

as teachers has, of course, nothing to do with 
the relative intelhgence and faithfulness of 
men and women. . . . Many women enter 
the public schools as teachers without any 
intention of long following the business ; and 
also. . . . women are absent from duty from 
two to three times as much as men. . . . 
The schools need the life-work of highly 
trained and experienced teachers. 

Cheap teachers and expensive apparatus 
and buildings are precisely the reverse of 
wise practice. 

As a rule the American programmes do 
not seem to be substantial enough, from the 
first year in the primary school onward. 
There is not enough meat in the diet. They 
do not bring the child forward fast enough 
to maintain his interest, and induce him to 
put forth his strength. 

It is not work which causes overfatigue so 
much as lack of interest and lack of con- 
scious progress. . . . One problem in arith- 



Cha?-ies Wiih'atn Eliot. 191 

metic which he cannot solve will try a child 
more than ten he can solve. 

American teaching in school and college 
has been chiefly driving and judging ; it 
ought to be leading and inspiring. 

Much time can be saved in primary and 
secondary schools by diminishing the num- 
ber of reviews, and by never aiming at the 
kind of accuracy of attainment which reviews, 
followed by examinations, are intended to 
enforce. 

Instead of mastering one subject before 
going to another, it is almost invariably wise 
to go on to a superior subject before the in- 
ferior has been mastered — mastery being a 
very rare thing. On the mastery theory, 
how much new reading or thinking should 
we adults do ? 

The really profitable time to review a sub- 
ject is not when we have just finished it, but 
when we have used it in studying other 



192 Educaiio7ial Nuggets. 

subjects, and have seen its relation to other 
subjects and what it is good for. 

The French programme puts a review of 
arithmetic, algebra, and geometry into the 
last year. With all his mathematical powers 
strengthened by the study of algebra and ge- 
ometry and with all the practice of arithmetic 
which his study of mensuration and algebra 
has involved, the boy returns at seventeen to 
arithmetic and finds it infinitely easier than 
he did at fourteen. Further, the French 
boy has escaped those most exasperating of 
arithmetical puzzles which a little easy 
algebra enables one to solve with facility. 

It is one of the worst defects of examina- 
tions that they set an artificial value upon 
accuracy of attainment. 

In all the numerous collections of school 
statistics in this country, it appears that the 
various grades contain children much too 
old for them, who have apparently been held 
back. . . . The result of this retardation is 
that the boy comes too late to the high 



Charles Wzlh'am Eliot. 193 

school or the Latin school, and so fails to 
complete that higher course if he is going on 
to business, or comes too late to college if 
his education is to be more prolonged. 

The great body of children ought to pass 
regularly from one grade to another, with- 
out delay, at the ages set down on the pro- 
gramme ; and any method of examination 
which interferes with this regular progress 
does more harm than good. 

The Gap Between Co7ninon Schools and 
Colleges. 1 890. 

To improve secondary education in the 
United States, two things are necessary : 
(i) more schools are needed ; (2) the exist- 
ing schools need to be brought to common 
and higher standards, so that the colleges 
may find in the school courses a firm, broad, 
and reasonably homogeneous foundation 
for their higher work. 

The Aims of the Higher Educaiio7i. 1 891 . 
Many people draw a distinction between 



194 Educational Nuggets. 

an educated and a practical man ; but true 
education is, after all, nothing but syste- 
matic study and practice under guidance. 

Universities have three principal direct 
functions. In the first place they teach ; 
secondly, they accumulate great stores of 
acquired and systematized knowledge in the 
form of books and collections ; thirdly, they 
investigate, or, in other words, they seek to 
push out a little beyond the present limits 
of knowledge, and learn, year by year, day 
after day, some new truth. They are 
teachers, storehouses, and searchers for 
truth. 

A great university exerts a unifying social 
influence. . . . The whole organization of 
college life is intensely democratic, and there 
is a complete fusion of the whole body of 
students in all the intellectual and all the 
athletic pursuits of the place. 

In a true university the differences be- 
tween the various religious denominations 
are softened, and mutual respect between 



Charles William Eliot. 195 

these diverse Christian organizations is 
cultivated. ... In such institutions great 
bodies of American youth acquire a respect 
for each other's religious inheritances, and 
learn that conduct has very little to do with 
creed, or at least is not dependent upon 
theological opinion. 

A university has a unifying influence by 
its effect upon political divisions. . . . There 
is. ... a continual ferment and agitation 
on all questions of public interest. This 
collision of views is wholesome and profit- 
able ; it promotes thought on great themes ; 
converts passion into resolution, cultivates 
forbearance and mutual respect, and teaches 
young men to admire candor, moral courage, 
and independence of thought on whatever 
side these noble qualities may be displayed. 

A university of national resort exerts a 
unifying influence through the mutual know- 
ledge which the young men get of one 
another and hold through life. 

American universities are schools of pub- 



Educational Nitggets. 



lie spirit for the communities in which they 
are situated. They promote thought and 
labor for the public on the part of private 
persons in two ways : first by demanding a 
great deal of gratuitous service from their 
trustees, or managers ; and secondly, by 
encouraging private benefactions for public 
objects. 

A university stands for spiritual and in- 
tellectual domination — for the forces of the 
mind and soul against the overwhelming 
load of material possessions, interests and 
activities, which the modern world carries. 

A university is in all countries a patriotic 
institution. . . . They seek ideals, and our 
country in the modern sense is one of the 
noblest of ideals, being no longer represented 
by an idealized person, as the king or queen, 
but being rather a personified ideal, free, 
strong and beautiful. 

Are all these aims of the higher education 
anywhere attained } Nowhere, as yet. But 



Charles William Eliot. 197 

they surely will be as our republic grows 
in wealth, wisdom and true worth. 



The Grammar- School Course. 1892. 

Averaging the rates of progress of bright 
children with those of dull children being 
the great curse of a graded school, it is 
safer to make the regular programme for 
eight grades, and lengthen it for the excep- 
tionally slow pupils, than to make it for ten 
grades, and shorten it for the exceptionally 
quick. . o - Holding back the capable 
children is a much greater injustice than 
hurrying the incapable. 

The first great reduction [in the volume 
and variety of the present studies] should, I 
believe, be made in arithmetic. ... On 
grounds of utility, geometry and physics 
have stronger claims than any part of arith- 
metic beyond the elements, and for mental 
training they are also to be preferred. . . . 
They have proved to be interesting and 
intelligible to American children from eleven 
to thirteen years of age. . . . Moreover, the 



198 E(hicatto?ial Nuggets. \ 

. . ( 

attainments of the pupils in arithmetic are j 

not diminished by the introduction of the ' 

new studies, but rather increased. 

I 

Secondly, language studies, including \ 

reading, writing, spelling, grammar and | 

literature, occupy from one-third to two- I 

fifths of most grade programmes. There is ' 

ample room here for the introduction of the : 
optional study of a foreign language, ancient 

or modern, at the fourth or fifth grade. ; 

Thirdly. ... by grouping physical geog- j 

raphy with natural history, and political j 

geography with history, and by providing i 
proper apparatus for teaching geography, 
time can be saved, and yet a place made 
for much new and interesting geographical 
instruction. 

[Noting objections to these changes, Presi- 
dent Eliot observes :] 

Practice in thinking with accuracy and ■ 

working with demonstrable precision can be ] 

obtained in algebra, geometry, and physics ; 

just as well as in arithmetic. It is quite un- : 



Charles William Eliot. 199 

necessary to adhere to the lowest and least 
interesting of these exact subjects in order 
to secure adequate practice in precision of 
thought and work. 

It is a curious fact that we Americans 
habitually underestimate the capacity of 
pupils at almost every stage of education, 
from the primary school through the univer- 
sity. ... It seems to me probable that the 
proportion of grammar-school children 
incapable of pursuing geometry, algebra, 
and foreign language would turn out to be 
much smaller than we now imagine ; but 
though their proportion should be large, it 
would not justify the exclusion of all the 
capable children from opportunities which 
they could profit by. 

The changes proposed. . . . are really 
essential to a truly democratic school 
system ; for they must be adopted and 
carried into effect before the children of 
the poor can obtain equal access with the 
children of the rich to the best education 
they are capable of, whatever the grade of 



20O Educational Nuggets. 

that education may be. . . . The rich man 
can obtain for his children a suitably varied 
course of instruction, with much individual 
teaching, in a private or endowed school; 
but the immense majority of American 
children are confined to the limited uniform 
machine programme of the graded grammar- 
school. A democratic society was never 
more misled as to its own interest than in 
supposing such a programme to be for the 
interest of the masses. 

[These changes] are indeed for the 
interest of this class of children [whose edu- 
cation is to be carried, beyond the grammar- 
school to the high school and possibly to 
the college] ; but they are much more for 
the interest of the children who are not 
going to the high school, and for whom, 
therefore, the grammar-school is to provide 
all the systematic education they will ever 
receive. 

There are two effective precautions 
against the ill effects attributed to overwork 
at school — precautions which, it is delightful 



Charles William Eliot. 



to see, are more and more adopted. They 
are good ventilation and the systematic use 
of light gymnastics at regular intervals dur- 
ing school hours. 

There is, however, a third precaution 
against overwork which is quite as important 
as either of these already mentioned ; it is 
making school work interesting to the 
children. ... To introduce new and higher 
subjects into the school programme is not 
necessarily to increase the strain upon the 
child. If this measure increases the interest 
and attractiveness of the work and the 
sense of achievement, it will diminish weari- 
ness and the risk of hurtful strain. 

Parents are sensitive about the promotion 
of their children. They want the dull ones 
and the bright to be promoted at the same 
rate. ... In Harvard College, where there 
is no such thing as a uniform programme of 
study for all students, .... we have long 
abandoned uniform attainment as ground of 
promotion. The sole ground of promotion 
is reasonable fidelity. I venture to believe 



202 Educational Nuggets. 

that this is the true ground of promotion in 
grammar-schools as well. 

I see many evidences that a great and 
beneficent change in public-school pro- 
grammes is rapidly advancing. The best 
evidence is to be found in the keen interest 
which superintendents and teachers take in 
the discussion of the subject. 

The GraTnmar-School of the Future. 1893. 

These are necessary conditions for health- 
ful mental activity: good air, good light, 
and, every hour or two, out-of-door exercise. 
I believe the grammar-school of the future 
will have about it a large open piece of 
ground. 

The grammar-school of the future is to 
have a large assortment of apparatus of vari- 
ous kinds. To begin with, it will have 
books. . . . We realize that every subject 
needs to be illustrated, for both teacher and 
pupil, by many and various books. 

There is no subject that does not require 



Charles Williain Eliot, 203 

its apparatus for teaching [e. g., Chemistry ; 
Physics ; Geometry]. 

It is extraordinary what interest and train- 
ing-power are imparted to Geography, sim- 
ply by the addition of one means of illustra- 
tion, namely, photographs of scenery. There 
is no point in reference to the formation of 
plains and plateaus, of mountains and valleys, 
of lakes and rivers, which cannot be beauti- 
fully illustrated by photographs. I say, 
therefore, that the grammar-school of the 
future will have within its walls a large as- 
sortment of models, charts, maps, globes, 
and photographs, for the teaching of Geogra- 
phy. 

This, again, means the expenditure of 
money. And how can we hope to acquire 
for the grammar-school these costly materi- 
als ? . . . . All these things can be gradually 
added with a moderate annual expenditure 
.... and the tendency of recent years is to 
decrease their cost. 

Another matter. ... we are apt to find 



204 Educational Nuggets. 

from fifty to sixty children under the charge 
of a single teacher —ordinarily a young girl 
whose experience in teaching has been short 
and will be short. . . . Never have I seen a 
university teacher trying to deal five hours a 
day with as many pupils as are put before 
every young grammar-school teacher in the 
city of Boston, for example. . . . and these 
.... are men of high training, large experi- 
ence, and great earnestness. It is obvious 
that the young woman with fifty or sixty 
pupils before her is attempting what no mor- 
tal can perform. 

The new teaching. . . . requires alertness, 
vitality, and sympathetic enthusiasm. It is 
exhausting. Virtue goes out of the teacher 
at every moment. 

What is the possible remedy } To double 
the number of teachers would not be too 
much. . . . The individual requires teaching 
in these days, and no teaching is good which 
does not pay attention to the individual. . . . 
But we must admit that to double the num- 
ber of teachers is not a practical aim, at 



Charles William Eliot. 205 

present, whether in the city or in the coun- 
try. We ask, therefore, is there no other 
possible solution of this serious difficulty ? 

At Harvard University. . . . the profes- 
sor can set before a whole class in an hour 
an outline of a course of study that will oc- 
cupy them a month. ... He can fill them, 
if he has it in him, with the enthusiasm 
which is to carry them on for a whole month. 
.... But when it comes to supervision of 
the daily work of a large number of students 
.... we provide assistants. . . . young 
graduates who have been through these 
very courses, generally under the guidance 
of the same professor whom they assist. 
They meet the principal teacher weekly or 
daily, and get their entire guidance from 
hrm. ... I am not prepared to say that 
the selection of the assistants by any other 
than the leading teacher would work well. 

One other suggestion. ... is that the 
principal teachers in any urban school sys- 
tem, and superintendents in any school sys- 



2o6 Educational Nuggets. 

tern, urban or rural, should take the part of 
the professor leading a class. I believe that 
the schools need many more highly-trained 
and experienced teachers than they now 
have, and that these principal teachers can 
work advantageously in many schools on 
the departmental plan. 

The Conferences on Secondary Education 
which met last December recommended a 
great extension of the subjects which are 
used in the grammar-schools of to-day, and 
the correlation of those subjects in teaching, 
so that all teachers may take an interest in 
several subjects. This recommendation 
would bring into the grammar-school many 
subjects now belonging to the high school ; 
and this change would cause the greatest 
possible improvement in the grammar-school 
of the future. 

In a democracy the public schools should 
enable any child to get the best training 
possible up to any year, not for the humblest 
destinations only, but for all destinations. 
This is the true view of the grammar-schools. 



Charles William Eliot. 207 

The American grammar-school will make 
that the rule which is now the exception — 
every child without special favor to get at 
the right subject at the right age, and to 
pursue it just as far and as fast as he is able 
to travel. 

The American people accept, as one just 
definition of democracy. Napoleon's phrase, 
" Every career open to talent " ; and I be- 
lieve that this saying will fairly characterize 
the grammar-school of the future. 

T/ie Uiiity of Educatio7tal Reform. 1894. 

The chief principles and objects of modern 
educational reform are quite the same from 
beginning to end of that long course of edu- 
cation which extends from the fifth or sixth 
to the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year of 
life. The phrase " educational construc- 
tion " would perhaps be better than the 
phrase " educational reform " ; for in our 
day and country we are really constructing 
all the methods of universal democratic edu- 
cation. 



2o8 Educatiofial N2iggets. 

The first of these objects is the promotion i 
of individual instruction. i 

Secondly, let me ask your attention to six ■ 
essential constituents of all worthy educa- i 
tion. . . . The careful training of the organs ; 
of sense. . . . Practice in grouping and ! 
comparing different sensations or contacts, j 
and in drawing inferences from such com- ; 
parisons. , . . Training in making a record 
of the observation, the comparison, or the i 
grouping. . . . Training of the memory. ... 
Training in the power of expression. ... j 
The steady inculcation of. . . . the ideals of 
beauty, honor, duty, and love. . 

Effective power in action is the true end i 
of education, rather than the storing up of 
information, or the cultivation of faculties i 
which are mainly receptive, discriminating, I 
or critical. • 

The selection or election of studies, ... , 

has been adopted by all colleges or universi- * 

ties worthy of the name, and by the greater j 

part of the leading high schools, academies, i 



Charles Wilh'am Eliot. 209 

endowed schools, and private schools. . . . 
It has within a few years penetrated the 
grades of the grammar-schools, and has 
earned its way to a frank recognition at that 
stage of education. 

By preference, permanent motives [for dis- 
cipline] should be relied on from beginning 
to end of education. . . . The formation of 
habits is a great part of education, and in 
that formation of habits is inextricably in- 
volved the play of those recurrent emotions, 
sentiments, and passions which lead to habi- 
tual volitions. Among the permanent 
motives which act all through life are pru- 
dence, caution, emulation, love of approba- 
tion, — and particularly the approbation of 
persons respected or beloved, — shame, pride, 
self-respect, pleasure in discovery, activity 
or achievement, delight in beauty, strength, 
grace and grandeur, and the love of power, 
and of possessions as giving power. Any of 
these motives may be over-developed ; but 
in moderation they are all good, and they 
are available from infancy to old age. 



2IO Educatiotial Nuggets. 

The specialization of instruction is a com- 
mon need from beginning to end of any 
rational system of instruction, and .... it 
is capable of adding indefinitely to the dig- 
nity, pleasure and serviceableness of the 
teacher's life. 

Administrative officers in educational 
institutions should be experts, and not ama- 
teurs or emigrants from other professions, 
and. . . .teachers should have large advi- 
sory functions in the administration of both 
schools and universities. 

The Function of Education in Democratic 
Society. October, 1897. 

Democratic education being a very new 
thing in the world, its attainable objects are 
not yet fully perceived. 

As soon as the easy use of what I have 
called the tools of education [reading, writ- 
ing, and simple ciphering] is acquired, and 
even while this familiarity is being gained, 
the capacity for productiveness and enjoy- 
ment should begin to be trained through the 



Charles William Eliot. 211 

progressive acquisition of an elementary 
knowledge of the external world. The 
democratic school should begin early — in 
the very first grades — the study of nature. 

The process of making acquaintance with 
external nature through the elements of the 
various sciences [physical geography, mete- 
orology, botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, 
geometry] should be interesting and enjoy- 
able for the child. It should not be painful, 
but delightful. 

The study of the human race should be 
gradually conveyed to the child's mind from 
the time he begins to read with pleasure. 
This study should be conveyed quite as 
much through biography as through history ; 
and, with the descriptions of facts and real 
events, charming and uplifting products of 
the imagination. 

Organized education must. . . . supply in 
urban communities a good part of the 
manual and moral training which the coop- 
eration of children in the work of father and 
mother affords in agricultural communities. 



212 



The school should teach every child, by 
precept, by example and by every illustration 
its reading can supply, that the supreme 
attainment for any individual is vigor and 
loveliness of character. 

From the total training during childhood 
then should result in the child a taste for 
interesting and improving reading, which 
should direct and inspire its subsequent In- 
tellectual life. . . . The uplifting of the 
democratic masses depends on this implant- 
ing at school of the taste for good reading. 

Another important function of the public 
school in a democracy is the discovery and 
development of the gift or capacity of each 
individual child. ... It is one of the main 
advantages of fluent and mobile democratic 
society that it is more likely than any other 
society to secure the fruition of individual 
capacities. ... In the ideal democratic 
school no two children would follow the 
same course of study or have the same 
tasks, except that they would all need to 



Charles William Eliot. 213 

learn the use of the elementary tools of 
education— reading, writing, and ciphering. 

Certain habits of thought should be well 
established in the minds of all the children 
before any of them are obliged to leave 
school in order to help in the support of the 
family. In some small field each child 
should acquire a capacity for exact observa- 
tion .... for exact description .... and 
the power to draw a justly limited inference 
from observed facts. 

Any one who has attained to the capacity 
for exact observation and exact description, 
and knows what it is to draw a correct in- 
ference from well-determined premises, will 
naturally acquire a respect for those powers 
when exhibited by others in fields unknown 
to him. ... He will be sure that the too 
common belief that a Yankee can turn his 
hand to anything is a mischievous delu- 
sion. ... In short, he will come to respect 
and confide in the expert in every field of 
human activity. . . . and in any democracy 
which is to thrive, this respect and confi- 



214 Educational Nuggets. 

cence must be felt strongly by a majority of 
the population. 

Democracies will not be safe until the 
population has learned that governmental 
affairs must be conducted on the same prin- 
ciple on which success for private and corpor- 
ate business is conducted. 

The next function. . . . should be the firm 
planting in every child's mind of certain 
great truths which lie at the foundation of 
the democratic social themes. . . . the inti- 
mate dependence of each human individual 
on a multitude of other individuals — not in 
infancy alone, but at every moment of life 
[in present living and in the debt owed to 
former generations]. . . . the essential 
unity of a democratic community, in spite of 
the endless diversities of function, capacity, 
and achievement. . . . the familiar Christian 
doctrine that service rendered to others is 
the sweet source of one's own satisfaction 
and happiness. 

Finally, the democratic school must teach 



Charles Wzlh'am Eliot. 215 

its children what the democratic nobility 
is. . . . Fidelity to all forms of duty which 
demand courage, self-denial and zeal, and 
loyal devotion to the democratic ideals of 
freedom, serviceableness, unity, toleration, 
public justice, and public joyfulness. 



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which is equally removed from nervous exhilaration and 
from depression." — Christian Register. 



Flexible Corded Cloth, gilt top, 40 cents. 



FORDS, HOWARD, & HULBERT, 
47 East Tenth St., New York. 



^^^ 84 im 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



019 794 184 4 



